Although $30 might have been enough to get into the Cubs-Diamondbacks series in Arizona this week, prices for first-round playoff games here in the land of championship-starved fans continued to climb Thursday.
Standing-room tickets for weekend games against the Diamondbacks were up to about $200 apiece, and top seats crested beyond $2,000.
Though playoff baseball might get a tepid reaction in the desert, the competition for Cubs tickets has been more bruising than usual this week in Chicago, as much a sport as baseball itself.
And the next round looks even more grueling.
About 30,000 tickets for three National League Championship series games sold out in just over an hour Thursday, the Cubs said. Within hours, hundreds were available on the Internet for at least 10 times the face price.
“The next round is definitely going to be a corporate event,” said Steve Buzil, owner of Sit Close Tickets.
There’s considerably more interest than there was in the White Sox at the same point during their World Series run in 2005, he said.
“It’s just a whole different demographic,” Buzil said. “You’re drawing from a wider base.”
Still, it’s a precarious market. Buzil said some of the prices being advertised on the Internet are inflated. And across the city, brokers were predicting that Friday’s prices could continue rising with a Cubs victory, or drop suddenly if the team stumbled a second night in a row. During the 2003 playoffs, interest sagged after Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, a game the Cubs lost after an infamous bit of fan interference.
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“We lost money on Game 7,” said Paul Brown, owner of AAA Tickets. “There was so much gloom and doom. Everyone was trying to dump their seats because they didn’t want to be there for a Game 7 loss. I had to sit in $3,000 seats I didn’t want to sit in because I couldn’t get rid of them.”
Fans not wanting to deal with brokers scurried to the Internet and phones Thursday trying to buy tickets directly from the team. Chris Knight, 25, retreated to a hidden nook at his office Thursday morning, where he sat hunched over his laptop. He ran back and forth across the office with his cell phone in hand, juggling work and what he hoped was a date with destiny next week.
“I was on the phone with several friends, and we were all trying to pool our resources,” the Lincoln Park resident said. “I came away with the only ticket among us all. Game 2. Eighty-five bucks. Section 208.”
Knight doesn’t mind that he’ll be sitting by himself.
“Just one lone ticket,” said Knight, who works in corporate real estate. “I’ll be making new friends that night.”
Less-lucky fans were left to try to find tickets however they could. Though there was little sign of the outrageous offers of last winter — when a Bears Super Bowl had ticket-seekers trying to trade advertising on their bodies or almost anything else for a seat in Miami — some Cubs fans tried unusual gambits.
Robert Alamo, 38, a Chicago firefighter, advertised himself on the Internet as a war veteran looking for a break. He can only afford $130, which he acknowledged in the posting, though he admitted to not being “a big baseball fan kind of guy.”
“I figured, why not?” Alamo said. “A lot of people out there are sympathetic with veterans and might have a warm heart. If you go through a ticket broker, it’s ridiculous.”
By late Thursday, he’d gotten no offers.
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(Shorter version published page 26, Chicagoland final edition.)
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