To put in perspective how long it has been since a Chicago team last won the World Series, consider this: In 1917, when the White Sox beat the New York Giants, the sinking of the Titanic was a fresh memory.
Liberty Bonds were being sold to underwrite U.S. troops in what was being called The Great War. The spitball was legal, but it wasn’t legal for women to vote. And Chicago had a Republican (!) mayor, William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, who leaned on the Tribune to inform him immediately of game results telegraphed in from New York.
The only way to see or hear a World Series game back then was to be there. Commercial radio coverage hadn’t even begun. Grandstand seats at old Comiskey Park with a face value of $4.50 were being scalped for as much as $35.
These days we can follow playoffs on TV, where you can watch close-ups and instant replays you can’t see at the park. The downside is that you also have to endure endless replays of that annoying Pepsi commercial where Angels slugger Vladimir Guerrero, whose bat turned to linguini last week against the Sox, hits a towering fly that smashes the moon.
But you can see it, for free if you still have an antenna. So who would pay grossly inflated prices to watch a championship ballgame in person? Apparently a lot of people.
Old-fashioned scalping on the street, which ranges from fans peddling extra tickets outside the stadium to counterfeiters out to fleece the unsuspecting, has been illegal since 1923. It still goes on, but it is now greatly supplanted by the operations of state-licensed ticket brokers who were granted the right in 1991 to legally resell tickets out of their offices. The legislature extended that right to Internet brokers a few months ago.
Buying tickets through brokers may be safer than getting them on the street, but its pricier. A Chicago World Series has proved a bonanza for brokers, even as it has frustrated fans now howling that they’d have to sell their kid to afford a ticket for him. One prominent reseller told the Tribune that its cheapest seat at U.S. Cellular for the Sox-Astros series went for $515. It sold a pair behind home plate for $7,500 each.
What’s going on here is a vivid example of the Chicago School of Economics, the theories about raw capitalism that won Nobel prizes for a bunch of University of Chicago professors not far from U.S. Cellular Field. Demand in the face of scarce supply drives up price, and there’s nothing scarcer than a World Series game in the Windy City. If this were New York or Atlanta, where fall playoff appearances are as regular as the turning of leaves, the price pressure might not be so great. But this is Chicago. Who knows? It could be decades until the next Series appearance.
And maybe, in historic terms, those scalpers’ prices aren’t so bad. When the Sox played in the 1917 Series, Chicago only had to wait seven years since the last one. (The Cubs in 1910.) When you figure in inflation, that $35 scalped seat back then would cost $593 today.
