Posts Tagged baseball
A Collision At Home Plate?
Apr 21
On Monday morning at 10 AM CT, the Chicago Cubs began giving their loyal fans a chance to start buying tickets to regular season games early, but there is a catch. It’s the Inaugural Mastercard First-Chance Presale of seats for the 2010 season, giving fans a chance to buy tickets before they officially go on sale on Friday.
The catch is that the tickets are marked up 20 percent. So while you can wait until Friday to pay $54 for a bleacher seat to see a game at Wrigley Field against the hated St. Louis Cardinals, they may already be gone if you don’t take advantage of your opportunity to pay $64.80 for that same ticket on Monday morning.
Though if you use a Mastercard to buy that ticket, it’ll only cost you $61.56 thanks to that 5 percent discount after the 20 percent markup!
As you’d imagine, this promotion is getting some reaction from Cubs fans in Chicago that isn’t exactly positive. It’s seen as if the Cubs are scalping their own fans tickets, which, in essence, they are. Still, this isn’t exactly anything new, and though they may be going about it in different ways, the Cubs aren’t even the only team in Chicago to do this.
Tickets for White Sox games went on sale this past Friday, though Sox fans who were members of the Sox Pride Fan Club could begin purchasing tickets as early as last Wednesday. Now, the tickets they bought early were at face value, but that price didn’t include the membership fee to join the club, which can run you anywhere from $24.95 to $134.95 a year.
What exactly is the difference?
The fact of the matter is that baseball tickets, much like everything else in the United States, follow the laws of supply and demand. There is a demand for Cubs tickets that far outweighs the supply, so therefore, the price is going to go up. So while fans may complain about the 20 percent premium on the Cubs presale, it’s probably not stopping them from logging on to the team’s Web site this morning to buy them.
2/15/2010 11:31 AM ET By Tom Fornelli
10 Craziest Baseball Rules
The guy in the photo above is Alexander Cartwright, and he’s credited with inventing the modern game of baseball. Only problem is that those initial rules from the 1840s were pretty messed up, in comparison to how baseball is played today. We’ve lauded a lot of these old timey baseball guys with handlebar mustaches in the past, but we might have to take it all back. In the 1800s, baseball was a goofy game with a lot of stupid rules. These guys would probably crap themselves if they had to face guys like Justin Verlander or Alex Rodriguez today. Here are The 10 Craziest Baseball Rules You Would Never Believe Existed. Besides the whole “no minorities” thing that we’re glossing over, that is.
10. Pitchers Could Cover Balls With Just About Anything
Before 1920, pitchers could cover the ball with spit, Vaseline, road kill, Nickelodeon slime or whatever the hell else they wanted. It apparently worked. That Babe Ruth guy didn’t start hitting a billion home runs a year until they outlawed it. We don’t actually know for a fact they used road kill, but that whole ‘Dead Ball Era’ thing would make more sense if they did.
9. Balls And Strikes Didn’t Really Exist
When baseball started, hitters just kind of stood at the plate whacking away until they hit the ball somewhere in fair territory. That created a question of what constituted a walk (see Rule Four) or a strikeout. In 1887, walks were even considered hits. And that was also the first year that batters were awarded first base if they got hit by a pitch. Called strikes didn’t even exist until 1858. And until 1863, base runners would run advance on foul balls. And as you’ll see in Rule Three, they didn’t necessarily run to the correct bases.
Have you ever seen a Little League game with 6-year-olds? It’s pretty terrible. That’s how we imagine old timey baseball must have looked. We even picture an old farmer so terrible at hitting, that his coach has to bring out a tee.
8. Catchers Had Zero Protection
See that old timey idiot in the picture below? It’s not his fault. Chest protectors weren’t introduced into baseball until 1885. It wasn’t until six years after that when catchers got to wear padded mitts. These poor bastards just had to stand there in a dumb stance and wait to get their goddamn faces blown off with a foul tip. But, then again, you’ll see from #1 that these guys weren’t really facing ‘the heat’ from pitchers until 1883. It’s just amazing it took the rules committee two years to realize that catching was a fairly dangerous job.
7. Pitchers Used To ‘Throw’ From 45 Feet
You’ll notice in the picture below that the pitcher (who isn’t even on a mound) looks crazily close to the batter. That’s because the whole 60-feet-6-inches thing didn’t exist until 1893. But hey, that’s 15.5 feet shorter to hurl your heavy-as-hell Vaseline/spit/pubes ball towards your poor bastard catcher.
6. Hitters Had Flat Bats
For some reason that we can’t figure out, hitters used to have flat bats until 1893. They really took their cricket influence seriously. Why did they want to use paddle bats? Maybe they wanted to spank the ball. Sounds pretty lame to us.
5. Pitchers Couldn’t Step Towards The Plate When They Threw
Seriously. In 1863 a rule was instated which said pitchers had to have both feet on the ground at the same time they threw. Was sh*t getting way to crazy until 1863? Modern day Major League batting practice is probably way more entertaining than old timey baseball. Either that, or it it mostly resembled weird-rules baseball from a middle school P.E. class.
4. Hitters Got Nine Balls Before They Walked
We said in Rule Nine that baseball rule makers had a real hard time with balls and strikes, but in 1879 it was decided that nine balls made a walk. How bad did a pitcher have to be to walk somebody in 1879? You would’ve had to be blind. It wasn’t until 1889 that the number was finally whittled down to four.
3. Base Runners Didn’t Have To Touch Every Base
From 1858 – 1864, base runners didn’t have to touch every base in order. Did they also play the “Benny Hill Show” song while these goofballs ran all over the field?
2. Batters Could Call For The Type Of Pitch They Wanted
From 1867-1887, batters had the privilege of calling for a low pitch or a high pitch. What was the point of pitching? Did the pitcher also have to wipe the batter after they went to the bathroom?
1. Pitchers Threw Underhand
That should blow your mind. Major League Baseball officially started in 1876, but it wasn’t until 1883 that pitchers were allowed to throw overhand. The initial rules of baseball stated that pitchers had to throw the ball as if they were pitching a horseshoe. So these old batters got to call for their pitch and get it thrown to them underhand. They couldn’t step towards the plate. No wonder the pitchers covered the balls in battery acid and pig manure.
