There’s nothing like a grand slam home run to take the lead in the eighth inning during the playoffs. The Chicago Cubs are the favorites in the NLCS against the Dodgers, and scenes like this from their crazy fans make you think this just might be the year when the curse if broken.
Right now at Wrigley Field pic.twitter.com/mTlOATlCiT
— Bill Reiter (@sportsreiter) October 16, 2016
The Cubs finished five games above .500 last year, so it makes sense that the organization would charge it’s long-suffering fan base 20 to 15 percent extra to buy tickets for the 2010 season early.
From the New York Times:
But the Cubs are adding a twist this year. On Monday, fans will be able to buy tickets to every Cubs home game, but at a premium of 20 percent over the face value, or 15 percent if they pay with a MasterCard. The MasterCard First Chance Presale will last until Thursday and include an undisclosed percentage of the pool of the Cubs’ single-game tickets.
“We believe there are fans who will pay extra, just like they’ll pay for a Fast Pass at the amusement park,” said Wally Hayward, the Cubs’ chief marketing officer. He said he was unaware of another team that holds a similar sale. “There’s a tremendous demand for Cubs tickets, especially from people coming from out of town, when there are games you must have.”
It’s a good business move for the Cubs and it makes sense from a profitability standpoint. But considering the state of the economy, it would be nice if teams lowered the prices of their tickets instead of backing their fans into a corner and forcing them to pay more for games they really want to see. And when it comes to the Cubs, there’s a good possibility that the product on the field won’t be that good again next year so why should fans have to pay more?
Photo from fOTOGLIF
The State brings up an interesting argument: Which baseball fans have had it worse – Cubs or Rays? The site goes into great detail and suggests that Tampa fans have had it worse.
Enough is enough: The poor, beleaguered Rays fan deserves a defense…Cheering for the Cubs is like carrying on with a rotten tooth; cheering for the Rays has, until this year, been like being stabbed in the face repeatedly with a butter knife.
Consider the plight of the Tampa Bay baseball fan. For pretty much the entire 20th century, he didn’t even have a team. If you don’t count that as suffering, consider that in the 1980s and 1990s, his city was regularly used as a means to extort other baseball-having cities into building new stadiums—the Twins, White Sox, Rangers, Mariners, and Giants all teased Floridian fans with threats to move to Tampa/St. Petersburg, but none of those deals came to pass. When Tampa did finally get a team in 1998, they instantly became the worst franchise in baseball—and perhaps in all of American pro sports.
Since 1998, the Cubs fan has watched his team play in October four times; the Rays fan has watched his lose 90 games 10 times. While the Cubs fan has taken in games at Wrigley Field, the finest park in the major leagues, the Rays fan has trudged into Tropicana Field, the only park in baseball whose ground rules distinguish between four possible calls that can be made on balls that strike one of several catwalks suspended over the field…Cubs right fielder Sammy Sosa hit 129 home runs in 1998 and 1999; former Rays right fielder Aubrey Huff is the team’s career leader with 128. On a given game night there are probably 8,000 Cubs fans drinking on Clark Street; the Rays could muster only 8,000 fans to a recent rally celebrating their epic ascent to the postseason.
I guess the question really becomes, is it a great suffering to have your team make the postseason but never win anything? Or never make the postseason at all? Personally, I would much rather have my team make the postseason every couple of years than to know they have no hope and then proceed to watch them lose 90 games. Although I’m never going to be the one to tell a Cubs fan they haven’t suffered.
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