You think Cubs-Sox tickets are hard to come by? Nah. Sure, if you sent an e-mail to Brian Garza in the Cubs' ticket office Wednesday, you got one of those automatic replies, saying he was out of the office but that ''we do not have any ticket availability,'' for the Sox series.
Don't fret. Just swing over to stubhub.com, where plenty of tickets are available. Not cheap, though. For Friday's game at Wrigley Field, for example, you could get up to five infield club box seats in Section 19 for $706 apiece.
At least, those tickets were there Wednesday afternoon. Four others in Section 19 were going for $541 apiece. Two seats in Section 19 were for $818 apiece, and another two, same section, same price. Want just one ticket? Section 19, $373.
''Anything in Section 19 definitely came from the Cubs,'' a legal ticket broker, who asked to remain anonymous, said Wednesday. ''These seats are coming right out of their box office to StubHub.''
Well, I'll admit that it's never a good combination for Average Joe when you mix the hottest ticket in town with an organization that set up a dummy ticket-scalping operation a few years ago for the purpose of skirting the laws to run a bait-and-switch scam against their loyal fans.
But we really have no way of knowing where those tickets on StubHub came from. And the three people I e-mailed or called with the Cubs on Wednesday didn't get back to me.
''We know where the tickets come from,'' the broker said, citing professional knowledge. And he then ran through the available tickets on the site, saying the ones in Sections 4, 6, 7, 19, 25, 26, 36-38 and 122 were all Cubs. Plenty of other seats in other sections, he said, were coming from season-ticket holders.
Believe him or not. He was the third broker to call or write me the last few days, wanting to point out what the Cubs were doing.
The thing is, we just can't tell anymore. The ticketing laws have all changed in the last five years since the Cubs tried to slip Wrigley Field Premium Tickets past you.
The Cubs were the test case. And when a judge ruled in their favor in a class-action suit that Cubs fans filed against their team, everyone followed their path into the scalping business.
Who can tell?
So are the Cubs now secretly going online with their tickets, printing one price on them, advertising that price to you and then never offering them to you at that price? Could be. They already tried to do this secretly once before, pretending they didn't own their scalping office.
More likely, they are selling these tickets to Premium, which is selling them on StubHub. That way, the tickets actually are being resold, one of the tenants of the ticket-brokering laws.
But we can't tell. Thanks to the Cubs, their high-dollar lawyers and a wrongheaded judge, Sophia Hall, the ticket-scalping industry is booming, with prices going way, way up.
The Sox are scalping tickets on their Web site. Major League Baseball got into the scalping business when MLB Advanced Media bought Tickets.com.
If you don't remember what happened five years ago, it went something like this. The Cubs, after fighting off ticket scalpers for years, saying they were draining the ticket supply and raising ticket prices for Cubs fans, decided to jump into the business themselves.
State law said you could broker tickets, but not to an event you were putting on. So the Cubs could not broker Cubs tickets. So they set up Premium, a dummy company, prettied it up and sold the idea that the Cubs didn't own Premium, but Tribune Co. did. Tribune owns the Cubs, as you know.
The Cubs told you their games were sold out, that their was no availability, and then shipped the tickets to their scalping office to resell to you. By then, Average Joe had been priced out, or tapped out.
Read it and weep
I remember talking to a machinist who said he had slept the night in his Buick for tickets, only to be told the games were sold out. And then to find out he had been lied to. A cab driver told about trying to get tickets for his family, but then only being able to afford the scalped prices for him and his daughter, then vowing never to go to a game again.
The story died down because the judge said it was all legal. But that didn't mean the Cubs stopped the dirty stuff. And it all came rushing back with the potential of more sneaky stuff on StubHub.
Are the Cubs hiding from their own prices, selling their own tickets anonymously? We can't tell for sure. We can't tell who's doing the scamming anymore.
But if you drop $700 a ticket for this weekend, you might wonder why that ticket says $50 or $60.
