PAYING DEARLY

                The Chicago Tribune, to which I subscribe online to keep up with news from my homeland, last week ran a couple of stories about the ticket prices of the Chicago Cubs, my favorite baseball team. Both made me blink.

                The first was that the Cubs this season will set aside 60 “lower terrace” (i.e., not the worst) seats at their Wrigley Field base for each home game and sell them for $10 each to winners of a lottery the team has set up. Those who want them will sign up at a website 48 hours before the game they wish to see, with the winners announced 24 hours later. It’ll be a two-to-a-customer deal so winners won’t have to attend alone—a nice touch, I thought.

                The second, appearing a few days later, was the counterpoint to the first. It announced the opening of “Club 1914” at Wrigley, a bar-restaurant named for the ballpark’s inaugural year whose membership will be limited to the people who purchased the 700 or so most-expensive Cubs’ season tickets this year, at prices ranging from $695 a game ($56,295 a season) to $400 ($32,400). The glass-and-mahogany affair, situated underground behind the home plate area, will dispense food and drink to the expense-account set while giving them pre-and-post-game hangout space, lockers, access to uncrowded restrooms and their own team-merchandise shop. No computer-lottery victory will be required for access to the place, the members having already won the grand lottery that entitles them to their enviable lifestyle.

                The gentrification of professional sports is no news, already stretching back several decades, but its manifestations still can startle. As a Great Depression baby raised in leaner times, I never fail to marvel at the extent to which people at various income levels are willing to pay to support their teams, even though a flick of a remote can bring the games into their living rooms at little or no cost.  The thrill of joining one’s voice to the roar of the crowd packs a punch that defies quantification or, to me, reason.

                In the 1980s and ‘90s my press pass got me into games for free, but my spectating long predated that. As a kid I saw a lot of Cubs’ games at Wrigley, paying the 65-cent grandstand kids’ ticket price well past the 12-years-old cutoff (I must have looked young), and as a dad years later took my own kids to see quite a few Cubs and White Sox games.

 For 22 years—1972-94—I had a piece of a couple of season tickets to see the NBA Chicago Bulls, receiving also an education in how such things are priced. The initial tag on our seats (second row, first balcony in the old Chicago Stadium, where the balcony hung quite close to the court) was, I recall, $5 each at a time when the fledgling Bulls were a poor draw, but the figure rose steadily until it hit about $30 during the first few of the Michael Jordan title years. Despite my ingrained cheapness I gulped and paid up until the team moved into a new home, called the United Center. When management kicked my group into the upper reaches of the vastly larger arena and about-tripled our seat prices I balked, never to return.

I’ve lived in the Phoenix area for 20 years now and have yet to pay to see an NFL, NBA or NHL game—too pricey! The baseball Arizona Diamondbacks have one of the lowest price scales of any Major League team and draw so poorly that the logistics of attendance at their downtown home park are easy. Wife Susie and I see about a half-dozen games a season, always sitting in the upper deck behind home plate where the ticket tag rarely exceeds $20 per.  By me they’re the best seats in the house, so maybe I should keep quiet about this.  Anyway, figuring in parking and my bratwurst and Pepsi (Susie is allergic to ballpark food and brings her own) the two of us get away for about $60.

The rest of humanity pays quite a bit more. Team Marketing Inc., a company that tracks such things, reported that in 2016, the latest year for which its figures are available, the average cost for a family of four to attend a Major League Baseball game was $212. That included the average prices of two adult and two kids’ tickets, hotdogs, beverages, parking, two programs and two adult-sized baseball caps, and while most people probably would do without the caps it’s still a sizable amount.

In some cities the $212 figure is a dream; according to an online source the average price of a ticket alone at Wrigley Field last season was $151, and it topped $100 at three other parks (Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park and the Atlanta Braves’ Sun Trust Park). The Diamondbacks were in the bottom quarter of the 30-team list at $58, while the Chicago White Sox brought up the rear at $30.

It’s further noteworthy that MLB is the bargain among our major team sports; the family-of-four bill for the average NBA game in 2016 was $329, with $358 for the NHL and $473 for the NFL.  Those figures change in only one direction, so they’re undoubtedly higher now. They’ve all increased by at least a third since 2000.

 It’s ironic that the cost of going to a game is soaring at a time when more teams are seeking (and getting) public financing for their stadiums. That means that a lot of people are being taxed to build playgrounds for teams whose games they can’t afford to attend. Even when the stadium is privately owned (such as Wrigley Field) taxpayers must support the infrastructure improvements and extra policing the games demand.

Buy hey!, if you’ve got 10 bucks, and you’re lucky, you might get to see a Cubs’ game this year.