I tend to agree with that. I'd argue ESPN has played a major role in college basketball's popularity as well. How many games a week would they air back in the early 90s? (Legit question, I have no idea)
I have no idea how accurate an indicator is (after 6 games probably not at all), but BR's SRS has the Cubs 8th in the NL. Basically they have 4 teams who have been excellent (STL, MIL, WAS, LA) and 4 who've been terrible (HOU, ATL, COL, SF)
When we know how terrible they likely are going to be coming in I'm not sure why we can't point it out. It's not like this was a team expected to put up good numbers that has surprisingly underperformed. Do you expect BacktoHendry to talk about the team statline after 7 games if they put up 8 runs today?
Cubs are 12th in OPS among the 16 NL teams, 60 points below average. I was referencing their numbers through 5 games. I don't calculate up to the minute stats, I just use baseballreference. ETA: HEY!! Maybe when numbers swing that much from one game we shouldn't say how terrible everything is already!
Their offense has been terrible - .221/.294/.338 The offense has been the worrisome point since this team was put together. Obviously there's some cause for hopw when Brett & Rizzo are recalled, but we're in trouble until that happens. Lahair has been one of the bright spots offensively. I'm Backtobanks and I don't understand relativity. I don't undestand what relativity has to do with my response that the offense sucks after you posted that "they've actually looked good". Because when I posted it, the Cubs were close to a league average offense, but you probably think a league average offense is something like 270/340/450.
Even with the bleak outlook on this year's team, walk-up sales are a pretty small part of ticket revenue. They sold 34,000 tickets for a Wednesday afternoon game in April when nobody thought the team would be any good.