On Tuesday night, the Chicago Cubs hosted the San Francisco Giants at Wrigley Field. The game was stopped just before the bottom of the fifth inning due to a sudden rainstorm. However, the groundskeepers were unable to unfurl the tarp over the infield in time, and parts of the infield were quickly flooded. After four-and-a-half hours of trying to get the field in something approaching a playable condition, the game was finally called at 1:16 a. m. Since the Cubs were leading 2-0, it went into the books as a Cubs win; under Major League Baseball rules, if a game has been called in the bottom half of the fifth inning and the home team is ahead, the game is official. Now it turns out that this fiasco may have been completely preventable. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the grounds crew was left short-handed because of a broader effort by the Cubs’ owners, the Ricketts family, to keep most of the team’s seasonal workers under the threshold that would require them to get health benefits under the Affordable Care Act.
The Sun-Times spoke with several Cubs employees who said that just before the season, the team carried out sweeping changes to the job descriptions and work limits for game-day workers at Wrigley Field in order to keep as many seasonal workers as possible under 130 hours per month–the definition of a “full-time worker” under Obamacare. “Big businesses” such as professional sports teams are required to provide health insurance for anyone who works more than 130 hours per month. On Tuesday, 10 members of head groundskeeper Roger Baird’s crew were sent home “with little, if any input” from field-level supervisors.
The lack of extra hands showed. According to three high-level officials from other MLB teams, the 15-man grounds crew who worked the game looked severely “undermanned” in relation to normal MLB standards for grounds crew staffing. Cubs spokesman Julian Green, however, said that it’s normal practice to send some of the groundskeepers home when the forecast calls for clear weather (though some forecasts did call for rain, according to the Sun-Times). But one of the rival team officials wasn’t buying it, considering that the Cubs are the fourth most-valuable team in baseball and have spent millions on hiring new baseball and business executives since the Ricketts family bought the team in 2009. The three officials from rival teams all said that their clubs did not make any changes to their operations when Obamacare became law. All of them rank lower than the Cubs on Forbes’ annual list of team revenues.
The Ricketts family is, for the most part, strongly conservative. Patriarch and TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts–a self-described independent–is a former board member of the American Enterprise Institute, and is the current chairman of the fiscally conservative group Ending Spending (and its associated super PAC). One of his sons, Todd, is a member of the Cubs board and is CEO of Ending Spending. Another son, Pete, is also on the Cubs board and was Ben Nelson’s Republican opponent for the Senate in Nebraska in 2006. It should be noted, though, that daughter and Cubs board member Laura is not only a bundler for Barack Obama, but is openly lesbian and a member of Lambda Legal’s National Leadership Council.
If the Ricketts family was trying to make a statement against Obamacare, it almost backfired. The Giants protested the game, arguing that under major league rules the game should have been suspended due to the failure to cover the field. On Thursday, MLB sided with the Giants, ruling that the tarp had not been properly wrapped after its last use. The game was resumed that afternoon in the bottom of the fifth inning, and the Cubs went on to win 2-1. It seems that if there had been a full grounds crew on hand, there might have been enough experienced hands to fix the tarp and get the field covered in time.
The Cubs have been “loveable losers” for most of the last 70 years. But there’s nothing loveable about this stunt.
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Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
