When you step in to the seating bowl at Wrigley Field, you’re almost blown away by the amount of green that comes at you. For nowhere else in the city of Chicago will you find as much of the color as you will at the well-manicured but emotionally forlorn corner of Clark and Addison in the Lakeview neighborhood.
There’s the perfectly manicured grass on the field, the lush, thick ivy covering the outfield walls, and the hand-operated scoreboard complete with perhaps the only analog clock you’ll ever see at a professional sporting venue anymore, its hands reaching out to dots demarking the time in a fashion that harks back to a simpler era.
Lately though, if you go to Wrigley you’ll allso see a lot more green of a different kind. Empty seats.
Or maybe there are people in those seats dressed like the seats themselves. Very festive.
I kid of course. The above picture was taken on August 24th just before the first pitch of a game against the Braves. The announced attendance at that game was a shade over 37,000 although having been at that game myself, I can tell you the above picture is relatively indicative of the turnout for the game. Maybe shave about 14,000 off that number and you’ll have a more accurate assessment of the evening’s crowd.
Perhaps the most accurate assessment of fan support on the North side these days though?
You can now get in the door at Wrigley for a buck. No, really.
Back in the day, you used to have to pay roughly and arm and a leg on the resale market to get through Wrigley’s turnstiles. Given the fact that being a Cubs fan has become trendy over the course of the past decade or so, demand for tickets has gone up as have the prices, and rightfully so.
That much was understandable when the team was actually, you know, winning. Cubs fans had more reason to cheer in the 2000s than in any decade since the 1930s with the team making playoff appearances on a semi-regular basis.
Even when things weren’t so good, Wrigley Field ostensibly sold itself. While the product on the field wasn’t very good, fans were drawn to the ballpark by any number of factors. The stadium itself is an aesthetic overload, to this day one of the prettiest belles at the ball despite her age. From the bright red marquee out front to the urban oasis of green described above, Cubs games are ostensibly a feast for the senses. Single men and women go because on a warm summer day, the bleachers are on par with any Wrigleyville bar in terms of potential to meet your mate.
But asthe sultry Chicago summer has slipped away from our grasp and the team on the field has come to more closely resemble a grown up Bad News Bears than a group of millionaires worthy of being lavished with lucrative contracts to play a child’s game, fans are at long last starting to stay away in droves.
Now, if you want to gain entrance to one of the Windy City’s most popular tourist attractions, all you’ve gotta do is scrounge around for a couple of spare nickels in your pocket and you’re off. The processing fees on StubHub will actually cost you nearly twice what you’ll pay for the tickets themselves, so that $1 ticket will eventually wind up costing you around $6. Still though, considering the fact that ponying up for one of those ducats at the box office will set you back a cool $14, it remains a fantastic deal if you’re simply looking to enjoy a cool autumn evening at one of sport’s most historic parks with some mediocre baseball thrown in as an added bonus.
All kidding aside, maybe this is perhaps the clearest indicator for Cubs ownership of the level of interest in the franchise. Fans are so desperate to get rid of their tickets that they’re willing to eat a significant loss to wash their hands of them. And even then, getting rid of them is no easy feat given the number of empty seats you’ll see at any given game.
