What is a Cubs Game Worth?

Do you really have to be there?

The newest Cubs ticket plan, the six pack, is now on sale at Cubs.com. Six games for $150 or more (they advertise the prices starting at $97, but the cheapest seats available in package E, for example, ring up at $141.16 once fees are included.) Not bad, all in all, I guess. You're going to pay $23 a ticket for not very good seats to 1 premium game and 5 games you'll try to sell to someone else (or maybe vice versa, I don't know you).

But is a trip to Wrigley worth that right now? I'll throw out all the other costs associated with getting to the game, because going into Chicago is worth it. I love Chicago. I love driving into Chicago. Up Lakeshore Drive. Through the tangled mess of the Dan Ryan. Neighborhood routes or expressway bypasses, I don't care. I love being in the city, and I'm not going to add the price of getting there into the Cubs' side of the ledger. Getting there is on me. Glad to do it.

Once I'm there, though, is it worth $23 to mingle around the statues and take in the ballpark rising from the cramped city . . . trapezoid; to trudge through the fog of beer fumes and hot dog vapors; to fade into a crowd of people who more than anything just want to see a Cubs win and enjoy a few drops of sunshine along the way; to sit in uncomplicated seats; to bring my voice close enough to the field that the players can hear my cheers of support and groans of disappointment and shouts of triumph? Is that worth $23? $30? $125?

How much is it worth to me to indoctrinate my sons with an emotional attachment to a team that offers little rational return on the investment? To bring them to a place so big and green and beautiful that reveals itself in a sudden wave of glory as we head up the steps onto the mezzanine? To sit beside them and talk about whatever they want to talk about and answer every question and not have a TV on? How much is that worth to cement a moment in time between me and the members of my family?

I guess about $15 per person is what I'm saying.

Remaining Cubs Ticket Sales Announced

Still want Cubs tickets? They're having a sale! Here's the gist:

This Friday, Feb. 11, a six-pack plan goes on sale. Six-ticket packages starting at about $100 plus taxes, fees, and what-are-you-looking-at? surcharges.

The Cubs have lifted their ban on the Saturday, June 18 game against the Yankees. A new 13-game plan featuring the previously unreleased tickets goes on sale now, NOW! Prices start at ZOMDR!

The MasterCard pre-sale is back and exactly the same as ever! Wednesday, Feb. 23 and Thursday, Feb. 24 will give fans the opportunity to spend more than they otherwise would for tickets no one else will be willing to buy. Hurry!


Plain-old vanilla single-game tickets will go on sale Friday, Feb. 25. You can buy them online or by joining the teeming severals of fans who like to wear wristbands and avoid the mass ticket-agent surcharges. They'll be selling tickets by phone, too, because some people apparently still use those.

Happy money losing!

Okay, that's totally jaded of me. I still love the Cubs. I hope they win lots and that the tickets are all worth every penny. But . . . *








*meaningful ellipses dripping with sarcasm

Cubs Refuse to Sell Tickets to Game with Yankees

Wally Hayward—executive vice president, chief sales and marketing officer for the Chicago Cubs and proud owner of the longest title of anyone whose occupation is not British royalty—says that if you're planning on seeing the Yankees play at Wrigley in mid-June (and the Cubs will be there too), you'd better buy as many tickets as you can to the Cubs' Pick 13 Plan that, as of . . . right now, will go on sale in an hour. The reason? He claims the series will probably be sold out by the time individual game tickets go on sale in February (no date yet announced).

According to Paul Sullivan, Hayward doesn't expect the single-game crowd to see any tickets trickle down their way:

Hayward said season ticket renewals are ahead of last year, and that the Cubs expect to sell out the New York Yankees series before individual tickets become available to the public.

"People who do wait for that on-sale date will most likely get shut out," Hayward said.

I find this extremely interesting, since . . . well, just look at the picture.

I see Friday tickets. I see Sunday tickets. I smell baloney.

 I'm curious to know how the Cubs plan to sell out the series against the Yankees through a combination of season-ticket sales (and I'm sure Hayward is being absolutely forthcoming about the strength of those) and this Pick 13 promotion that offers bleacher tickets and "bowl" tickets (their term for the reserved sections, which, in true Wrigley style, aren't configured to resemble a bowl so much as a trough) to just two of the three games.

The only conclusion I can muster is that the Cubs will not be selling tickets to the Saturday, June 18 game. Just won't sell them. No deal, Burns. Take your interleague lust and shove it.

Reserve Your Cubs World Series Tickets Now!

This is the year! Seriously. Kind of.

Major League Baseball has a brand new innovation this year that makes it possible for even us lowly Cubs fans to reserve our place in line for World Series tickets . . . in 2010! I wish I was kidding. Well, I wish I wasn't being sarcastic about not kidding.

For the low, low price of $20 ($10 for NLDS and $15 for NLCS) any fan can reserve the opportunity to buy World Series tickets at the home ballpark of his or her choosing (plus a $1 per order transaction fee, because it wouldn't be MLB if they didn't charge you for the convenience of buying the right to buy something).  So you can go right now and be assured that if the Cubs make the World Series, you'll have a chance to buy a ticket at face value. No strings attached. No chance in hell attached, either, but that's your gamble.

Taking the Cubs Ticket Pre-sale at Face Value

Whatever laws exist to curb scalping, they don't apply to the Cubs. photo via gothamist.com

The Cubs have announced a plan to give fans who want to purchase single-game tickets in advance of next Friday's full-scale sale event at a 20% markup. Of course, they'll offer a 5% discount and a contrived Cubs.com shopping e-coupon to customers who use their MasterCard to buy tickets. So is this a rip-off? Are Cub fans the victims of corporate greed?

In a word: yeah. But in another word: no.

Single-game tickets generally go to three groups of people: 1) people with ticket budgets below the season-ticket level; 2) people on the season-ticket waiting list who want to buy as many tickets as they can; 3) scalpers who want more tickets to sell than just their season ticket packages.

For the people who can't afford or aren't willing to spend more than a fixed amount on Cubs tickets, this promotion is bad news. They (we) have to choose between buying advance tickets at a higher price and perhaps getting a better selection but fewer games or waiting to buy the normal price tickets and getting a poorer selection of (and quite possibly fewer) tickets and games.

The third group, the scalpers, usually buy single-game tickets by employing teams of wristbanded grunts to hang out at Wrigley and buy as many tickets as they can, bypassing the usual surcharges, taxes, and inconvenience fees. All it costs the scalper/ticket broker is a slim $50 or so per grunt while loading up on hundreds or even thousands of tickets. But at a 20% markup with the additional per-ticket and per-order fees piled on? Not gonna happen. Their profit margin vanishes.

The scalpers probably get hurt by this the most, because their biggest profits come from the best tickets, which they'll still have in spades via season tickets, but their single-game ticket supply will take a major hit. That frees up a fair amount of tickets to . . . the people in group #2 who would have wound up buying tickets from the scalpers anyway.

That's right, the big winners in this pre-sale are the people whose ticket buying is limited only by the fixed supply of tickets, not by their desire or ability to purchase tickets. Okay, maybe that doesn't sound like the traditional definition of "big winner" to you, but at least these people can move to the front of the line to buy the tickets they were always going to buy in the first place.

So people with less desire for tickets or less disposable income with which to buy them will get lousier tickets to less interesting games. The Cubs will recover a lot of the money scalpers would have collected. The absolute ticket fiends and college students with brand new credit cards and no sense of financial restraint will be closer to the field.

Did Cubs fans get the shaft? Some of them. But this is hardly a heartless move by the Cubs. It's just a manipulation of capitalism that creates more PTWBRITT (Profits That Will Be Reinvested In The Team). And if that happens, we all win, right?

Virtual Waiting Rooms

80. By my best count, that's how many Virtual Waiting Rooms I had open in my quest to enter the inner sanctum of the financial prison rape that is Cubs Ticketing. But since I entered into the relationship willingly, I'll never be able to press charges.

The exact cents come up a bit short, but the long and short of it is this: $5 per ticket convenience fee (which I find decidedly inconvenient . . . hmm, this post is turning into an extended allusion to the Shawshank Redemption), $4 processing fee, and a $2.50 "print at home" fee. Now, the sisters over at tickets.com would have to force me to agree to that little twist, since receiving the tickets by mail is absolutely free. I know it would be cheaper just to show up at Wrigley and buy the tickets myself. But the sheer audacity displayed by the Chicago National League ball club should be expressly prohibited. It's insulting. It's demeaning. It's despicable.

Yet somehow I found myself submitting to it all like a frat pledge. And they say the people most likely to abuse are those who have been abused themselves--sure enough, I found myself on StubHub just a few short hours later, trying to see if some poor sucker would be willing to let me do the same to them.

How many more lives have to be ruined before we wise up?!?

Cubs Have Gone Platinum, Baby!

I can't tell you what a thrill it is to take that first look at the Cubs pocket schedule every year. These days you can see the schedule long before the printed copies roll off the presses, but holding the schedule in my hands takes me back to when I was a kid. I remember poring over that thing every year, seeing what team (if any) the Cubs played on my birthday. I'd look for the scheduled double headers, the five-game series, the hated Mets . . . the thing was filled with wonders.

This year brought a brand new surprise. Four tiers of games! Bronze (el cheapo), Silver (you're gonna pay), Gold (too rich for my blood), and Platinum (dude, don't even ask). I guess those translate into four levels of desire: 1. I'll go if you have an extra ticket. 2. Yeah, I'll call in sick. 3. I'm going. That's all there is to it, I'm effin going. 4. If it was 40 below and staying home from that game was the difference between a long, satsifying life and a cold, horrible death from hypothermia, I still wouldn't give you the satisfaction. Go Cubs! (Yes, I did allude to Pulp Fiction and The Cutting Edge in succession--deal with it.)

Cub ticket pricing has reached satirical levels. They really are just making fun of us with what they charge to watch a game at Wrigley. The fact that they added a platinum level of game, that they expect us to swallow (and Cub fans will, with glee) the notion that some of the 81 home games are just too precious to miss, games that will make normal Cub games look like business meetings . . . it's just a little insulting.

Still, I'm ready to order tickets tomorrow. I just don't see platinum in my future.