HOT TIX

               As a Depression baby, born in 1938, I’ve always had a thrifty streak-- okay, a cheap one. As someone once described the golfer Sam Snead, I like to know the price of my breakfast before I eat it. That is to say I don’t mind spending money if I get value in return but draw the line on frills. For instance, having a Lexus isn’t worth its $10,000 difference with my Toyota, which gets me where I’m going just fine, thank you.

               Thus it is that I’m regularly revulsed at what has been happening with sports- ticket prices. The Wall Street saw that no tree grows to the sky doesn’t seem to apply to them. Just when you think they’ve topped out, they shoot up again, and people stand in line to pay them.

               I admit that my perspective may be warped by my earliest box-office experiences. I got into my first Chicago Cubs’ games for nothing, as in zero, and did it legally. Back around 1950, when I was 11 or 12, other kids and I would ride our bikes over to Wrigley Field at around 3 p.m. in season and wait until the gates were opened to let the paying customers leave. While they were going out we’d go in, to watch late-inning play. Sometimes games would go into extra innings and we’d get a bonus.

            

              When I paid for Cubs’ tickets back then I’d ante up 65 cents for a grandstand seat. Kids could get into the bleachers for a quarter, but I thought the better view was worth the extra money. What can you see from the bleachers, anyway?  If memory serves the adult price for the grandstands at the time was something like $1.50.  

Even as an adult I could attend games for what today amounts to pocket change. In 1972, recently back in Chicago after a decade elsewhere, I was part of a group of four that shared a couple of season tickets to games of the Chicago Bulls, then still a fledgling team in the NBA. Our seats were excellent, in the second row of the first balcony, behind the Bulls’ bench in compact Chicago Stadium, and went for $5 per.  We held the same seats through 22 years and three NBA championships (1991, ’92, ’93), and while the team raised prices regularly ours didn’t top $30 in that span. We bailed when the Bulls moved into the new and vastly larger United Center in 1994 and proposed to kick us up to the nosebleed level at more than double the price. Seats comparable to the ones we used to have go for about $200 today.

What sent me off on this latest rant was an internet posting I came across during a recent browse. An outfit called “promocodesforyou,” which offers discount coupons on a variety of products, put together four very neat graphs showing the average (repeat, average), one-person cost of attending a game last season for each team in our four major sports leagues-- the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball. Topping the list, at $925.80, was the New England Patriots of the NFL. Baseball was headed by the Cubs at $170, the NBA by the New York Knicks at $176 and hockey at $600.66 (!) by the Vegas Golden Knights.

Now, I don’t know anything about the research that went into the chart and must note that its prices included not only admission but also the “average” spending for food, beer and parking that a stadium trip often entails.  As any fan can vouch, parking can come to a hefty slice of an outing’s cost, but the prices still startled.

The Patriots’ tab came to close to $1,000 per, so I looked a little deeper into it. Sure enough, a visit to a ticket resale site showed that two lower-deck, midfield seats for the team’s Sunday (Nov. 17) home game with the Philadelphia Eagles were offered for $2,025.98, without any trimmings. As for parking, although cheaper berths are available far from Gillette Stadium, reserved-spot prices ranged from $67 to $486. I had trouble believing that last figure, but there it was.  I bought my first car for a price not much above that.

As for baseball, my prime example of wretched excess came last year when my Cubs opened an in-stadium eatery and drinkery for holders of the 700 or so most-expensive seats in Wrigley Field. Admission to the place began at the single-game ticket price of $400 and topped out at $695. That’s to see a baseball game—one! For those prices a free open bar wouldn’t be too much to supply.

The picture strains credulity even at the average-guy level. The Pittsburgh Steelers were in the middle of promocodesforyou’s NFL scale at about $400 a seat. A pair for the team’s 10 home games (eight regular-season and two preseason), thus would come to $8,000. For a couple earning an above-average $100,000 a year, that would come to more than 10% of its annual after-tax pay.

That many people are willing to take such a hit is seen in the attendance figures of the NFL, NBA and NHL, all of which have held about steady at over 90% the last dozen years. In each of those sports, though, demand is relatively inelastic due to the shortness of the football season and the smallish (17,000-20,000) seating capacity of the two indoor sports in their big-city settings. It’s a standing joke in Chicago that hockey has 20,000 local fans and each has a Blackhawks’ season ticket.

Baseball has long (81-game) home schedules and large stadiums, so there’s more room for fluctuation. Its attendance has been declining, with this year’s total gate of 68.5 million ticket sales off about 4% from the season before and 14% from the 2007 high of 79.5 million. MLB has turned itself inside out trying to account for the drop, mostly fingering the sport’s deliberate pace and length of games, but it seems to me that economics also are to blame. To paraphrase Jimmy McMillian, who a few years ago ran for mayor of New York on a rent-control platform, ticket prices are too damn high!

 I recommend doing what I do, which is watch on TV. Everyone at home can see a game better than anyone in the stadium, and there are no lines for the bathrooms.