Series ticket prices give travel day new meaning
CHICAGO: Record-shattering resale ticket prices for World Series games in Chicago sent devoted Cubs supporters driving to Cleveland, where cheaper tickets let them watch two games and travel for less than one comparable Wrigley Field seat. With the Cubs not having played in a World Series since 1945 and owning the longest title drought in American sports dating to 1908, tickets are already at Super Bowl price levels.
And if they win Friday and Saturday to reach the brink of a crown, tickets to Sunday’s showdown could become the most expensive resale seats in US sports history-rivaling the Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather fight and certain Super Bowls. Facing that expense and following so many decades of heartache, many Cubs fans decided to drive to Cleveland for the first two games and pay less for resale seats there, still a relative bargain even figuring in gas, food and lodging.
Cubs players took notice of the fan support in enemy territory, notably a “Let’s Go Cubs” chant Wednesday after Chicago scored the game’s opening run. “It was great to see all the blue,” said Cubs outfielder Ben Zobrist. “There was a lot of royal blue out there, Cub fans all over the stadium. So that was really cool. “Knowing there are Cubs fans everywhere and they travel to follow us, that’s what makes it fun and makes the motivation high for us to try to win this.” It’s a tale of two cities and two long-suffering sets of supporters that played out Thursday over 343 miles on the Ohio Turnpike, Indiana Toll Road and Chicago Skyway, as Cubs fans returned home on a travel day for both clubs in Major League Baseball’s best-of-seven final. “We got priced out at Wrigley. That’s why we did it,” said Shaun Longworth, who took a friend and went to games one and two in Cleveland, a 6-0 Indians victory followed by a 5-1 Cubs triumph.
After the Cubs lost the series opener, Longworth said the pair “decided we can’t go home like this”-and they dropped $1,500 each for game-two seats in the second row. “We kind of blew our budget,” he said, but “we got the real experience. “It was incredible just to be there and soak up the atmosphere. Cleveland fans were really great and they understood. Kindred spirits.” If anyone can understand Cubs fans, it would be Indians backers. They own the second-longest championship futility streak in baseball, not having won the crown since 1948. They last reached the Series in 1997.
But the only person in Indians gear at the rest stop named for three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Wilbur Shaw on the Indiana Toll Road-dubbed “The Road to the World Series” by highway department signs-was Matt Driscoll, and he wasn’t Wrigley bound. “I wish,” he said.
As a cashier put it when she rang up two snack item prices together that came up $6,000 and was told that’s a World Series ticket price: “No, then I would have to double it.” —
‘Kindred spirits’