Chicagoans felt as if the worst of another hard winter was finally over when last Friday dawned sunny and mild and single-game tickets to 2010 Cubs games went on sale.
Pitchers and catchers had reported to Arizona for spring training earlier in the week, and a game-day-like sense of anticipation boosted the spirits of fans standing patiently in lines at Wrigley Field.
Tom Ricketts, the Cubs’ new owner, contributed to the cheerful ambience, arriving at the park before 8 a.m. with coffee and donuts and chatting up the customers as they awaited an opportunity to buy seats that cost, on average, 10 percent more than last year.
Ricketts’s amiable presence seemed to offset any grumbling over higher prices for a disappointing team — no one in line could recall anyone from the Tribune Company, the Cubs’ corporate, faceless former owner, showing up with refreshments for the masses.
Neither could anyone recall the previous owner offering a pricey presale enticement that provided access to the most desirable games and — for ticket buyers willing to pay 20 percent more than face value and then “save” 5 percent by using a certain credit card — eliminated the need to stand in line.
Friday’s buyers found most of the seats for the games with the White Sox, Cardinals and Brewers gone in the online presale, which ended Thursday and which provoked some grumbling and underscored a major challenge facing the Ricketts family: How do you maximize Wrigley Field revenues without alienating a restless fan base that would like some emotional return on its financial investment before it is tapped out?
Based on last week’s sales and on recent history, the Cubs expect to draw three million fans for the seventh straight season. Their ticket prices remain third highest in baseball behind the Yankees and the Red Sox, who can justify the cost — between them they have won 7 of the last 14 World Series.
The Cubs, as we know, have not won a World Series in 101 years or played in one in 65. Yet the team keeps asking its fans to invest in hope and dig deeper while they are stretched to cover the necessities of real life.
Ricketts, a Cubs fan long before he was an owner, said that his own ticket-buying experience involved plying his brother with beer and pizza to get him to stand in line for bleacher seats. But as the sons of a billionaire, they never had to sweat the cost.
He has said all the right things about respecting Cubs history and tradition and honoring the almost sacred trust. He hears from fans who wistfully recall when they were 8 years old, attending their first game with their grandfathers, mesmerized by the lush green setting and the majestic scoreboard and getting hooked on the Cubs forever.
Ricketts understands that the ballpark experience is essential to cultivating loyalty. But beer and sunshine and socializing are no longer enough — not at these prices. For all their success at the gate, the Cubs are chronic underachievers on the field, and it’s no longer cute or funny. Not at these prices.
Marc Whitney, 44, is a Chicago native, a lifelong Cubs fan who indulged his youthful passion by working as an Andy Frain usher at Wrigley Field and seeing 40-plus games a year.
Now living in Milwaukee, he is trying to raise his son in the religion and has been making two or three Cubs trips a year. But, after paying $215.67 online for three right-field-corner, upper-deck box seats to a Friday afternoon game against the Phillies in July, the Whitney family will be making only one Wrigley trip this year.
The face value of those tickets is $156; the additional cost comes from taxes and the “convenience fee” the Cubs charged in the pre-sale.
Similar seats would also cost $156 at a Fenway Park ticket booth, and no wonder — the Red Sox are the Ricketts’s role model for their baseball business.
There are similarities between the Cubs and the Red Sox, beginning with their cozy, neighborhood ballparks, each a shrine-like attraction unto itself as a symbol of history, of baseball as it was meant to be played.
There are also significant differences, beginning with on-field performance. The Red Sox have been to the playoffs in seven of the last eight years and won the World Series in 2004 and 2007.
The Cubs are poster guys for baseball futility, with a 1-6 record in postseason series since their last pennant in 1945 and with a nine-game playoff losing streak.
And they have a thriving, less expensive rival just eight miles to the south that would be primed to steal market share if baseball loyalty weren’t so deeply ingrained in Chicago.
“This has always mystified me: The White Sox play in a newer, nicer park with better amenities, more parking and frequently a better team,” said Marc Ganis, a sports marketing consultant.
“Yet they draw, on average, 40 percent fewer fans. That’s the power of Wrigley Field.”
That power comes at an increasingly steep price. Maybe too steep.
Read the original article from the Chicago News Cooperative.
Distributed via Chicago Press Release Services
