Tickets to the Cubs' first home playoff game at in seven years might as well be made of gold. They sold out almost as soon as they went on sale, and sellers on the secondary market jacked up their prices at a rate that's absolutely bananas.
The average price of tickets from secondary sellers to Monday's game at Wrigley Field is $715, according to data collected by Rukkus.com, a company that aggregates and sells tickets from more than 100 sources. That's more than twice the average selling price for the first two games of the team's series in St. Louis, which is $342. The New York Mets have the second-highest average price for tickets ($539) among the teams that are still in the World Series hunt. Like the Cubs, they haven't seen very much success in recent years.
If the price that tickets are selling for is any indication, Chicago's Cubby fever is more intense than it was for the Blackhawks during their Stanley Cup championship run last spring. When the Hawks hosted the Predators during the first round of the playoffs in April, tickets sold on the secondary market for an average of $323. Stanley Cup Finals tickets in Chicago were selling for an average of $1791. At this rate, watching the Cubs play in their first World Series at Wrigley Field in 70 years (knock, knock) will cost about as much as a 1999 Toyota Camry.
For a lot of Chicagoans, the Cubs' magical 2015 campaign has been about more than baseball. It's been about hope, pride, redemption and other campy feelings that people attach to their local sports clubs. So if you're one of those folks who really wants to catch an in-person moment of a run that's a century in the making, you should probably pick up a second job (or, you know, be a rich person).