Cheering On The Home Team

I loved this article in today's WSJ about the Cubs, and specifically about a (shared) season ticketholder's dismay about a $0.60 price reduction (on over $13K), despite the fact that the Cubs have no chance of making the postseason in 2013:

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 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.

Tell me why I shouldn't take that approach? I asked.

"Every season's sacred and anything can happen," [Colin Faulkner, vice president for ticket sales and service] said.

Faulkner talked about attending a game this year with his parents and watching his 6-year-old son fall asleep on his mother's lap.

I reminded him that he didn't have to pay for those tickets. When I shell out $300 and my daughter falls asleep, or spends half the game going back and forth to the bathroom, I don't get sentimental; I get upset.

Faulkner goes in for the close.

"I'm asking you to renew your season tickets," he says, looking me in the eye. "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."

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?

Yes, it is. Especially when you have spouses and kids and jobs to care about.

Yet at a baseball game, I still cheer and dance with joy at the sight of a ball hit long and high over a wall. There's no logic to it.

For 12 years I've been part of a group of Cubs fans who have suffered and (less often) celebrated together. Though the tickets are in my name, they belong as much to my friends as to me. When I put the matter to a vote recently, 13 of the 15 men and women in the group chose to renew.

There may be no logic to my love of the Dodgers (who, unlike the Cubs, have a brighter future for next year). But I've renewed my season tickets anyway, as well.