I emailed the Cubs and asked if the team's owner, Tom Ricketts, or its president for baseball operat

Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of ChicagoSide, Jon is the New York Times best-selling author of three books: “Luckiest Man,” “Opening Day,” and, most recently, south america cruise travel “Get Capone.” In addition to his books , he has written for The New York Times , The   Wall Street Journal , and Esquire . He has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, NPR, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.
As a season ticket holder south america cruise travel for 12 years, I was relieved. Last season’s team was painful to watch—or more painful than usual, I should say—and tickets were almost impossible to unload. So, when I received my invoice from the Cubs last week, I was eager to see just how much the team had cut prices.
My package, which I divide among 15 friends, fell in price to $13,314.56 from $13,315.16. There is an asterisk: south america cruise travel I will receive eight more tickets next year, so the average price per ticket did drop by about $2, from $60 to $58. Still, my bill was reduced by a mere 60 cents. Which means my kids can get those gumballs we’ve been saving south america cruise travel for.
I emailed the Cubs and asked if the team’s owner, Tom Ricketts, or its president for baseball operations, Theo Epstein, would sit down with me and explain why I should spend this kind of money for a team that has almost no chance of playing championship baseball in 2013.
Instead of Ricketts or Epstein, the Cubs gave me Colin Faulkner, vice president for ticket sales and service. We sat at a back table at Bernie’s, across the street from Wrigley. He ordered a Blue Moon and I had a Revolution IPA. Faulkner’s first pitch was a soft toss: He said he’d recently spoken to a fan whose father had been a season-ticket holder and had died without ever seeing a World Series. This fan was planning to take over his father’s ticket plan and leave an empty seat in honor of his dad when he finally watched the Cubs win it all.
Imagine if you owned the second-worst team in baseball and you had a waiting list of 115,000 customers. Would you reduce ticket prices? Of course not. And if you did, you’d reduce them by, oh, about 60 cents, as a gesture to fans for suffering through a season of misery. And then you’d jack up the prices again the following season assuming the team was slightly better than miserable.
Last year, Cubs ticket prices were second highest in the league and the Cubs ranked 10th in attendance, despite losing 101 games. Over the past two decades, according to a recent report, Cubs ticket prices have increased 265 percent, more than four times the rate of inflation.
The other day, Epstein, in an interview, justified the high prices by saying Wrigley Field was a special place to watch a game. Well, Mr. Epstein, the Lyric’s a special place to watch an opera, too, but nobody pays to hear lousy singing.
All fine and good. But the Cubs are not going to make the playoffs next year. While I wait for them to improve, I can buy tickets on StubHub at huge discounts—sometimes for less than a buck, if last season is any indication. And with the money I save I’ll be able to pay whatever it takes to get a ticket to the 2047 World Series.
I reminded south america cruise travel him that he didn’t have to pay for those tickets. When I shell out $300 for my family to go a game and my daughter falls asleep, or spends half the game going back and forth to the bathroom, I don’t get sentimental about it; I get upset.
“I’m asking you to renew your season tickets,” he says, looking me in the eye. “We want you back…we want you to be part of what we’re building…. This is not the time to get out. This is the time to double down.”
For 12 years I’ve been part of a group of Cubs fans that’s been suffering together and (less often) celebrating together. Though the tickets are in my name, these tickets belong as much to my friends as they do to me. When I put the matter to a vote last week, 13 of the 15 men and women in the group chose to renew.
Is it foolish, perhaps even childish, to cheer for something as meaningless as a baseball team? Is it nuts to wear the hats and jerseys of a commercially exploitative corporate entity that happens to own a ball club?
My friends and I have reached ages where it’s no longer considered appropriate to care about foolish things. We care about our spouses and our kids and our jobs, of course. But do you remember south america cruise travel what it was like to care—really care—about silly things? About things that made no sense, that were never going to make the slightest difference in your life but mattered south america cruise travel so deeply south america cruise travel that you weren’t afraid to act the fool to show it?
Even after Game Six in 2003, there was still one more chance, and it could have been a career-defining moment for Wood, even more so than his 20-strikeout performance against the Astros in 1998. One game, and everything might have been different—for him and us.
Cubs season-ticket holder and self-proclaimed baseball zealot Bill Savage noticed south america cruise travel something different in this year s block of tickets, something dare he say artistic? Savage probed the front office and got the skinny.