The End of the (Baseball) World as We Know It

 How nice of the Tribune to devote some of its scarce resources to covering a baseball team, even if it was the Cubs on their opening day Monday.  But the front-page story about the new Catalina Club at Wrigley Field was definitely worth reading.  Two paragraphs in, and I knew that the end of baseball as we know it is just about here.

 

The club is located behind home plate in the upper deck, where one fan said he used to have four season tickets.  Those cost him $18,000 a year, unlike the $106,000 he said they were now going for in the new club format.  (The Cubs, naturally, declined to comment.)  And here I thought having $18,000 spent on season tickets qualified you for membership in the one percent.

 

Baseball is well on its way to generating multiple revenue streams for every game played.  The extremely well-heeled can go to the ballpark, sit in a seat or in a club.  Everyone else can pay for the privilege of watching the same game on TV, and I don’t mean free-TV, like in the olden days of Channel 9.  No, the Cubs will be off of free-TV, except for the occasional game of the week, come next year, and fans can expect their cable providers to pass along the cost of carrying the Cubs’ new channel.  That just about does us freeloaders in.

No, wait, there’s still radio.  I figure at some point within the next decade one team will lead the move from radio to streaming, for a fee.  What a brave new world we’ll be in then.  All the commissioner will have to do at that point is find a way to erase bleachers and knotholes from public memory.