So I went to bed last night after the sixth inning and the Cubs were down 11-1.
And I woke up to an 18-1 loss. Four days after the Cubs gave up 12 runs in the 8th inning against the Rockies.
17-2 against the Rockies…fine. I can handle that. The Rockies are about a million miles away. I know a total of 1 Rockie fan…and he doesn’t really care. And the Rockies aren’t that bad of a team.
But last night? To the Brewers? UGH!!!!
My mom’s cousin bought the tickets that I had for last night’s debacle. I feel like I need to give her a refund. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in selling any more tickets for this season because it would just be too mean to make someone watch this cruel joke that is playing on the field.
The Cubs have the most expensive tickets in baseball…even higher than the Yankees and Red Sox.
I have a question for you all…when was the last time the Yankees or Red Sox put up a season like this one?
Honestly, I can’t remember.
The Red Sox have missed the play-offs a couple times in the last 15 years…but they still seem to have, at the very minimum, 85 wins every year. And the Yankees? I don’t even want to know.
The thing is, the Cubs are now, financially, supposed to be at the same level as, at least, the Red Sox. Yet, when their team falters, they only win 85 games and miss the playoffs by only a few games. When a Cubs team falters, they are a joke. Why is that?
And it would be different if the Cubs flopped and they were playing in the AL East where it seems at last one team always wins 100 games…but they aren’t. They are playing in the Comedy Central where the winner of the division seems to barely crack 90 wins every year.
Yes…I’m venting here…and I have no solutions, but all of us Cubs fans have been ripped off this season. When you have a $145 million payroll, you should NEVER have a season a pathetic as this one. On top of that, you should never have to go into a rebuilding process that may take 2 or 3 years. We all expect the payroll to be greatly reduced after this season…but in the end, the Cubs are still going to spend $120 million next year on a team that likely will not be competitive enough to make a run at the NL Central title.
So where do we go from here? I don’t know, but only 37,000 fans bought tickets to a game against our #2 rival last night (and even fewer showed up). So that’s a start.
If payroll is to be reduced, and a true rebuilding process is to begin, then ticket prices MUST BE reduced next season. I know this will be a bitter pill for the Rickettses to swallow and it will likely result in the Cubs going further into debt…but this must be done for the long term viability of this fan base. Lowering ticket prices might even result in them foolishly altering or reducing in scale the renovation plans for Wrigley. But ticket prices cannot remain at the level they are at this year. You can’t charge Yankee and Red Sox prices for fans to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates.
There is a new generation of fans that the Cubs brought in during the 2003 season, and those fans are bordering on the edge of leaving this team forever. They have other things to take their attention now. And the next generation of fans, as of right now, has nothing to draw them to the team. The games aren’t on nationally as much anymore (via WGN), and the Cubs don’t have a superstar player draw anyone in.
On top of that, as more and more Cubs fans experience what it is like to see a game in a stadium in other cities that is actually nice, the willingness to go and spend a college fund on watching a game at the dump that is Wrigley Field will continue to drop.
You can’t expect fans to spend $55 dollars a ticket on a bad team that has not one single superstar and expect them to be happy sitting in a cramped seat, and pay $7.50 on a crappy italian beef sandwich and $6.75 for Bud Light (and pissing it away in a joke of a bathroom that only has things to pee in that should be used to feed cattle) and then pay all this in the worst economy that this country has seen in the last 70 years.
***************************
Ok…enough of that.
On the good news, I will finally be closing on our new house this afternoon, which hopefully means that I’ll be able to focus more on this blog and attending a few more games over the next couple months. It’s been a roller-coaster ride and after 9 months of hell trying to sell our old crappy house, and then trying to buy a nice new house, it will all come to an end. In a way, I feel fortunate that the Cubs decided to suck this season, because if they hadn’t, I would have felt like I missed a lot.
