Want to see World Series 2016? Prepare to pay – really big.
Tickets for World Series games at Wrigley Field are selling for twice as much as any other World Series ticket.
Chicago Cubs baseball fan Robert Lyons, who lives in Los Angeles and was raised in Berwyn, Ill., shows his World Series tickets outside Wrigley Field on Monday, in Chicago.
Michael Tercha/Chicago Tribune/AP
The Chicago Cubs will soon have the chance to win their first World Series in more than one hundred years, but with ticket prices skyrocketing, who will be able to afford to watch?
Ticket sales experts say that games in this World Series could be some of the most expensive sporting events in history. Fans who wish to witness the hotly contested confrontations between the Cubs and the Cleveland Indians must be prepared to fork over a small fortune in order to gain admittance.
"There's no question that Chicago was going to be a hot market," said StubHub spokesperson Cameron Papp, according to USA Today. "To this point, it appears the games in Chicago will be the priciest baseball games we've seen."
After a final 5-0 victory over the LA Dodgers on Saturday, the Cubs finally made it to the World Series, much to the joy of a delighted fanbase. Yet although three of the possibly seven-game-long series will be held in Chicago, fans could be hard pressed to actually make it into Wrigley Field to watch.
“Right now Game 5 in Chicago would be the second-most in-demand event we have ever seen, only topped by Mayweather-Pacquiao,” SeatGeek spokesperson Chris Leyden told USA Today. “That means right now it tops all of the Super Bowls we have seen. That being said, I would expect that price to end up lower, unless the Cubs are going for the clinch that game.”
Tickets for all three games in Chicago currently average about $3,500 per ticket, and if the Cubs make it to the third game of the three, Game 5, tickets are retailing at an average of $4,614 on the secondary ticket market.
To put the 2016 World Series ticket prices in perspective, a similarly long-anticipated showdown between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals in Boston’s Fenway Park in 2004 set StubHub’s previous ticket record.
The cost of entry to Game 1 of the Sox’s famous curse-reversing World Series run? An average cost per seat of $1,825, about half of the cost of the average ticket to this year’s World Series games in Chicago.
Cleveland Indians fans aren’t exactly immune to the excitement either. The team last won a World Series in 1948, meaning that Cleveland residents last saw their team win the historic championship around the same time that they last saw a World War II victory parade. Between the Indians and the Cubs, the teams have suffered through a combined World Series drought of about two centuries.
That’s enough to make any die-hard baseball fan willing to hand over the price of a used car or European vacation for the chance to be a part of a few hours of history.
SeatGeek’s Mr. Leyden says that ticket prices began to climb as it became more likely that the Cubs would finally make it to the World Series. While the astronomical prices may dip in the hours immediately before the games, they’ll still be pricey.
For now, if you want to watch the Cubs or the Indians try to make history from a bleacher seat at Wrigley Field, you’d better be ready to pay up: the cheap seats are going for $2,000 a piece, The Daily Beast reports.