Too Much by Half

Lost in all the hoopla over the White Sox blowing up (dare a skeptic say “trashing”?) their roster was news that the Cubs are raising the price of season’s tickets by an average of 19.5 percent.  It will now be possible to spend $409 to watch a ballgame on the North Side.  The mind boggles, or at least mine does.

Allow me a geezer moment with a “Why, I remember back when” story.  In eighth grade, I bet a teacher two tickets to a White Sox game that his homeroom wouldn’t reach its quota for a school fundraiser.  I won the bet, and he paid off by dumping so many pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters onto my desk (after which he announced, “Everybody clear their desks, now!”  The man was a real joker.)  If I had won that bet today, a Cub ticket would’ve buried me alive in pocket change.

You can’t beat City Hall, they say, or hold back the march of time, but I can damn well complain about them.  The more expensive baseball gets, the more the ballpark turns into an “experience” on a par with Great America or Disneyland.  The new parks have that function built into them while the classics like Wrigley and Fenway have to gobble up surrounding streets in order to create some sort of festival area.  Anyone who wants to watch a simple ballgame either gets with the program or gets labelled a crank.  Guess which category I fit into?

So it goes.  Paul Konerko, who made a shade under $130 million most of that with the Sox, is hailed as “a blue-collar hero” while Dexter Fowler can switch from the Cubs to the Cardinals in the blink of an eye.  Granted that the reserve clause was wrong, but how is baseball as “experience” better for fans?  If the cost of games continues to rise, attendance will start to decline as fans opt to watch on television.  When that happens, MLB will find a way to charge for every game broadcast.  Just wait.