IStock Photo 5696258 © Alan Crosthwaite

In 1909, about 2.7 million children were born in the United States. Today, 100 years later, only a small fraction survives. The rest have passed on—about 80,000 centenarians are alive in the US today—dying without ever having witnessed the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.

The Cubs are a study in futility. They have not won a World Series in over a century—their last championship came in 1908, when Teddy Roosevelt was still President and Ty Cobb still a promising youngster. The Cubs have played in seven World Series since—the last coming in 1945—and lost all of them. On six other occasions they have made the playoffs, failing each time to advance beyond the League Championship Series.

Huffington Post author Monroe Anderson posted the following email from a reader complaining of the futility of rooting for the Cubs:

"My grandfather was born in 1914 and became a Cubs fan when he came to Chicago from Minnesota around 1940. He didn’t get to see them in the World Series in 1945 because he was still in Europe, having fought there in WWII. He died in 2000, having been a fan for over 60 yrs without ever seeing the Cubs in the Series."

"My father was a Cubs fan. Born in 1941, he was too young to have any memories of the 1945 Series’ appearance. He died in 2001, having been a fan for over 50 yrs without ever seeing them in the Series. I am a Cubs fan. I was born in 1967 and therefore have never known a pennant winning Cubs team despite being a die hard for 32 yrs."

It has been so long since the Cubs last won the World Series that we estimate that just 1 in 3,109 adult Cubs fans were even alive when they last took home the title. The other 3,108 have suffered with no reward. How do we come to that number?

Well, we start with a Gallup survey which found that 1 in 2.22 American adults is a baseball fan. As the US adult population is about 225 million, that leaves us with roughly 100 million baseball fans that must be apportioned by team.

To find what percentage of the total MLB fan base to give to each team, we added together every ball club’s average attendance and TV audience for 2008, and divided by the total amount for the MLB. So, for example, 172,000 households tuned in to watch the average Cubs game last year, while almost 41,000 showed up to Wrigley Field. In total, then, that’s 213,000 fans per game, assuming one person was watching each TV (which probably isn’t totally right, but close enough for our purposes). Add those numbers up for each team and we find that on a day with a full slate of games, about 3.57 million fans will watch their hometown team. The Cubs get a 6 percent share of that.

It’s a bit of a crude measure, but it works well. The Yankees end up with the biggest fan base, with 1 in 9.77 fans, and the Nationals end up with smallest—just 1 in 97.36. The full rankings, available at the end of this article, seem consistently reasonable.

We now apply this measure to the total number of MLB fans. So for example, 1 in 16.77 baseball fans roots for the Cubs—with 100 million total adult fans, that makes for something like 6 million Cubs fans.

If we assume that the proportion of fans is the same at each age, we can break these results down further. For example, there are about 3.9 million 30 year-olds living in the US today. If of those, 1 in 2.22 is a baseball fan, and of those 1 in 16.77 is a Cubs fan, then we can say that there are something like 104,000 30 year-old Cubs fans living in the US today.

None of them, of course, have seen the Cubs win a World Series. Indeed, since the Cubs have not won the championship since 1908, a Cubs fan would have to be 100 years old (in 2008, which is when our data comes from) for them to have won a World Series in his lifetime! Of the roughly 6 million Cubs fans, fewer than 2,000 are 100+, meaning that the odds a Cubs fan has seen his favorite team win during his lifetime are just 1 in 3,109.

For most teams, the number is not nearly so bad. In all, 1 in 1.42 adult MLB fans have witnessed their team win the championship in their lifetime, and for the fans of the 11 teams that have won a World Series in the past 18 years that number is 1 in 1. Some teams have never won, so there aren’t odds that their fans have seen a win (technically, the odds would be 1 in 0); but somehow even those fans seem to be better off than the Chicago cohort.

No fans whose teams have ever won have had to suffer like the Cubs’; only the San Francisco Giants (1 in 3.01) and Cleveland Indians (1 in 4.3) have suffered such long droughts that less than half their fans have seen them win a World Series. The Cubs, of course, are in a league of their own.

In sum, then, the vast majority of adult baseball fans have already seen a World Series victory in their lifetime, and those that haven’t are generally very young. So there is hope, even for those long-suffering Cubs fans.

* Available Canadian fanbase data was insufficient to reasonably calculate the odds of being a Toronto Blue Jays fan.