Tom Ricketts Wants All Your Money, and Knows You'll Give It to Him, Grumbles and All

The Chicago Cubs will only be playing 79 home games next year, as opposed to the normal slate of 81. That’s because of the Tokyo Series games against the L.A. Dodgers that will kick off next season, which the Cubs are technically “hosting”.

Don’t fret, though, season ticket holders! Just in case you thought that would mean that total prices would come down, the Ricketts family has you covered.

We don’t need to belabor any doom-and-gloom points about the 2024 iteration of the Chicago Cubs. They’re not going to make the playoffs. They haven’t made the postseason since the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when they barely won a non-competitive NL Central and got swept by the barely-.500 Miami Marlins in the first round of the expanded playoffs. They haven’t won a postseason game since falling to the Dodgers in the 2017 NLCS.

Everything is getting more expensive in this world. Inflation exists, and the value of the dollar yesterday was more than the value of the dollar today. You don’t need a degree in economics to understand what’s going on, just like the Rickettses don’t need a degree in customer service to continue price gouging you for a mediocre team.

These price increases will affect every ticket for next year, from the bleachers to the suites. No matter where in Wrigley you like to soak in the action, you’re going to have to cough up a few more bucks per game to do so in 2025.

The more cynical take on this development is that this is the Ricketts family’s way of passing along the losses of passing the first threshold of the luxury tax along to the fans. Indeed, the team chose to spend on players (however unwisely), and despite their failure to make the playoffs, there are financial penalties to be paid for crossing the initial competitive balance tax line. Owning a team is a business, and as operating costs grow more expensive, so must the product, lest profits don’t continue setting records year after year.

Alternatively, you can be a bit more optimistic. Perhaps these price hikes aren’t the consequence of a fluke spike in spending, but rather a sign that the spending will continue. Maybe the ownership group has informed Jed Hoyer and company that their jobs are on the line, and the team plans to loosen the purse strings in free agency this winter. Surely, anyone reasonable would pay a few more bucks for seats if it means Juan Soto is patrolling right field at the Friendly Confines for the next decade.

If you take a grander landscape view of baseball, the Cubs were already one of the most expensive teams to see in the league. Using research from Money Geek, the average price for a family of four to see a Cubs game this year is $154 ($87 for tickets, $14 for parking, $53 for food and drinks). That’s above the MLB average of $140, and way above the Miami Marlins’ mark of $83, though the experience is more reasonably priced than seeing a Dodgers ($219) or Yankees ($161) game. Again, that’s for individual game tickets, so price increases will impact those tickets more severely than those of season ticket holders.

Take this news how you will. There’s something to be said for the fact that it’s a better sign that tickets are getting more expensive rather than less, as that would portend another rebuild--which exactly zero Cubs fans want to sit through. Yet, there’s also an argument to be made for making the great game of baseball more accessible, rather than less so. For every effort Rob Manfred and the league office make to appeal to a more casual audience, the owners take another step in the opposite direction: cultivating a smaller number of customers willing to pony up many more dollars than those casual fans and working-class families. Whether it’s more expensive tickets, local game blackouts, streaming service exclusive games, or RSN bankruptcies, it feels like baseball will just never be able to get out of its own way.

For those of us with an inelastic demand for baseball games, this financial hit isn’t going to push us away. It’ll make us cringe a bit when we look at our receipts, but it’s just the price of doing business with professional sports teams in 2024. We're the suckers the Ricketts family and their ilk are counting on. For those who are a little less serious about their fandom, though, the idea of going to a Cubs game just became less appealing.