Cubs Tickets Priciest in MLB

It's opening day at Wrigley Field. And despite the Cubs 101 year World Series Championship drought, it will now cost you more to see this year's motley assemblage in blue perform than any other team in major league baseball.

According to the Wilmette-based Team Marketing Report, the Cubs have now overtaken the Boston Red Sox with an average ticket price of $52.56. That means "a day of fun at the old ball park" as Jack Brickhouse used to blurt, will now cost a family of four $329.74, when you add in parking and all of the other associated costs.

The Cubs were second in the majors with a 10.1% price increase for 2010.

Thank you, Ricketts family.

But as the Cubs limp into Wrigley today with a 2-3 record, hitters that can't hit in the clutch and a bullpen creakier than the boards on the deck of the Mayflower, they will be sold out this afternoon.

You see, the Cubs now are chic.

But it wasn't always that way.

Back in the mid-60s, the old owner, P.K Wrigley, couldn't give away Cubs tickets.

On a bone-chilling opening day in '67 or '68, one of my avid Cub fan childhood friends ditched grammar school to attend along with about 1,014 other stalwarts (or lunatics depending on your perspective.)

P.K. was so grateful that he gave them each a certificate for free admission to another game. I wonder what the 2nd place prize winners got -- 2 tickets?

Back in 1964, the year the Cubs traded away future Hall of Famer Lou Brock for a sore-armed pitcher, Ernie Broglio, to save money ladies used to get in for free every Wednesday.

I'm sure that P.K.'s marketing geniuses thought this would turn Wrigley Field into a chick magnet. In reality it gave suburban mothers an excuse to pack the station wagon with the neighborhood kids and bring them to a game. The moms would get in for free and the kids would set them back a quarter a piece.

My mom did that with me and my neighborhood baseball card trading pals on several occasions.

According to an old scorecard that I have (I was lucky enough to get it autographed by future Hall of Famer, Juan Marichal) that year an Oscar Mayer hot dog cost 30 cents and a Budweiser bottle 40 cents.

Bleacher admission was 50 cents.

That was, of course, before the great liberal Democrat, Lyndon Baines Johnson, inflated the US currency to pay for his wildly successful wars: his war in Vietnam and domestic war on poverty.

In 1981, Cubs Manager, Lee Elia went into his famous on-tape, career ending, obscenity-laden rant when he said that most of the city of Chicago worked for a living and the rest came out to Wrigley to boo his ballclub.

Despite a nation-leading 11.9% unemployment rate you won't see the unemployed represented at Wrigley today.

It's just too bloody expensive.

Frigid Wrigley Field -- Filthy Chicago Weather

It was 35 degrees with a bellowing northeasterly wind at game time for the Cubs home opener yesterday. MLB attendance reports suggested that all 40,077 seats were sold out, but in reality it seemed only about half that number were masochistic enough to actually sit thru the entire ordeal.

Certain days become hallmarks in ones mind against which to measure certain developments and for me the weather on opening day has always been one of those. It makes me appreciate how entirely filthy Chicago's weather usually is.

I had the good fortune to escape Chicago for a bit more than a decade. Living in one of the balmy states of the Old Confederacy, I would still monitor the Cubs via the WGN superstation and recall one wonderful opening day in 1992 when I was basking in the Virginia warmth, wearing my shorts and a knit polo shirt. Yesterday, on opening day in Chicago, I was wearing my down parka, scarf, gloves and 180 earmuffs.

One of my childhood friends aspired to become a sportswriter in the footsteps of his uncle, a storied sports columnist for the Chicago Daily News. So he was more fanatic than most of us in following the Cubs and was crazy enough to take the El down to Wrigley on a wintry opening day in the late 60s.

It actually snowed that day and only about 85 people actually showed up for the game -- this being the era when the skinflint, P.K. Wrigley fielded real dogs year after year.

Apparently, P.K. , who Royko used to say "threw nickels around as if they were sewer covers," was in an unusually magnanimous mood that day, because he had the Andy Frain ushers hand out vouchers for free tickets to the next game to the 85 or so stalwarts.

P.K. Wrigley was so cheap that for a couple of seasons, he would actually send the ushers to collect foul balls caught by fans, so that the Cubs could reuse them. The fan would then get a certificate attesting to the fact that he had caught or otherwise captured a foul ball at Wrigley field.

Mike Murphy on the sportstation WSCR once quipped to a caller that P. K. Wrigley was so cheap that he filled the resin bags on the mound with kitty litter to save money -- to which the caller retorted, "USED kitty litter."

Anyway Chicago weather really stinks and one of the only celebrities I ever heard speak truthfully about it was John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, who spent a year or two here with the Second City troupe in the '60s.

While plugging a movie during a recent WGN radio interview, he was asked what he thought of Chicago.

He said, "I suppose it's a nice enough place, but your weather is just so awfully filthy."

I always liked John Cleese.