Where'd everybody go? Cubs, MLB pay for lockout

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Whether it's a sign the Cubs are starting to overdraw their ATM fan base or that the whole industry pissed some people off with the lockout, there was definitely something the Rickettses and their front office were selling that the fans weren't buying during opening weekend.

Namely tickets.

None of the first three games were sold out, including a 35,112 announced crowd for Opening Day that represented the lowest-attended home opener with full capacity available in nearly 20 years.

And even that 2003 crowd of 29,138 for the Cubs-Expos opener was significantly dampened by the fact that opener had been postponed by snow.

You have to go back to the end of the last labor stoppage — 1995 — to find a lower attended home opener without local extenuating circumstances and/or capacity restrictions.

The opening dip wasn't isolated to the Cubs. Neither team in Chicago sold out its home opener. The Royals endured their lowest Opening Day attendance since 1995. And even the defending World Series champions in Atlanta were down from the last pre-COVID opener.

For a Cubs team that has routinely drawn 3 million fans a season, it was especially conspicuous.

Maybe a few more doses of Seiya Suzuki and Marcus Stroman will lift the early sales malaise.

Maybe Rob Manfred can give each of the fans, say, a set of Bose headphones as a goodwill gesture and peace offering? Maybe the Cubs owners can stop acting like they own the Reds — or maybe they can move the team to Rosemont?

If none of that works, at least they still have European soccer.

Wait, what? Headphones?

That's right. After unilaterally and unnecessarily locking out the players for three months in a negotiating tactic that stalled talks and free agent spending, the most unpopular baseball commissioner since at least Bowie Kuhn left gifts of fancy headphones to each player before their openers as a so-called peace offering in his attempt to create a better relationship with the union and its rank-and-file.

Here's a thought or three on that relationship: Save the damn headphones. Do something real about the plague of tanking in your sport. Quit treating players like they're a bothersome cost, and recognize that they're the actual game. And allow actual market forces to guide payroll spending — or at the very least stop pretending player salaries are some kind of problem during a time of unprecedented revenues in the sport.

Oh, and stop lying about a lack of correlation between paying players and winning, and stop encouraging the misperception that higher player salaries somehow make ticket prices go up (teams charge whatever they think people will pay regardless of payroll levels, and the prices have yet to drop in proportion to tanking teams' payroll reductions; see: Cubs).

Oh, yeah, and while you're at it, maybe let somebody else present the "piece of metal" to the World Series winners next time around.

Swing tones

With a shoutout to the nerd table at the far end of the press box, we share this nugget from Cubs $99-million rookie Seiya Suzuki’s big debut weekend against the Brewers:

Among the 57 pitches he saw in the majors through three games, Suzuki swung and missed only once. Along the way he homered, singled twice and hit a sacrifice fly.

He also struck out looking four times (matching his walk total).

“He knows his zone and is staying committed to that,” manager David Ross said. “There’s not a lot of even flinching at borderline pitches. He’s also struck out looking a couple times, which tells you how committed he is to his zone.

“He’s not going to chase. If things stay right there, he’ll continue to learn these pitchers and continue on the path he’s on.”

That last point is probably the biggest one. Suzuki swung and missed a lot in his first few games of the spring, as if fishing for what he could hit in the new league of unfamiliar pitchers and unfamiliar stuff.

“I’m not quite there yet in terms of my adjustments,” Suzuki said after Sunday’s game.

Maybe a little closer after his big two games in Pittsburgh? Maybe by the time he's done with four games in Colorado this weekend?

Anyway, thanks, again, for counting up that swing-and-miss stuff, @MLBastian.

In other words, please don’t be true

Say it ain’t so.

Todd Frazier, the former Reds All-Star and Home Run Derby champ, retired last week — and along with him went the greatest, most out-of-the-blue-(eyes) walkup music in the game.

Whether in Cincinnati, New York or even briefly with the White Sox, Frazier set his unique tone to every at-bat with “Fly Me to the Moon,” the only Frank Sinatra walkup music heard in a big-league ballpark during his decade-long career, when they let him play among the stars.

The New Jersey native once said his grandparents played the song a lot when he was a kid, and then his high school coach also played it during batting practice. And “I just fell in love with it.”

A tip of the fedora to Frazier on the well-played soundtrack of a career.

It's better to have gloved and lost?

Despite the bullpen loss Sunday that prevented a season-opening sweep of the Brewers by the Cubs, one big number stood out above all others:

Zero.

It's not only the number Sunday's starter, Marcus Stroman, wore on his back during an impressive Cubs debut.

It's also the number of errors committed by the Cubs in a remarkably clean series, especially considering they played in adverse weather for two of the three games and finished the series with a third baseman in left field.

Take the poll

If the Cubs proved nothing else over the weekend, it’s that it is, indeed, how you finish, not how you start.

However — and with all due respect to the NL’s blown-saves-leading bullpen — check out the starting rotation performance one series into the season.

Kyle Hendricks, Justin Steele and Marcus Stroman allowed two runs in a combined 15 2/3 innings (1.15 ERA) with 15 strikeouts against the defending NL Central champions — albeit against a less-than-fearsome Brewers lineup.

If not for the BS-prone pen, they would have combined for a 3-0 start even on extra-cautious workload restrictions after the short spring training.

GDubGrub

Anyone headed to Pittsburgh for the first time to see this week’s Cubs series already can’t miss on the ballpark experience at beautiful PNC Park. But the shouldn’t-miss experience is across the bridge and about a mile and a half down the road in the Strip District. That’s where the original Primanti Bros. sandwich restaurant and bar — founded in 1933 — is located and open late (though not as late as it was in pre-COVID years).

And by “sandwich,” we mean big, bad, epic and famous sandwiches with fries and cole slow piled on top of a wide choice of meats and cheeses. Don’t fill up on too many hot dogs at the game before heading over (but these things can soak up plenty of beer in the system).

*Sigh* young

Asked a question about his career arc on the day before he made his third consecutive Opening Day start, Sox pitcher Lucas Giolito took the best shot — intentional or not — at assembled grizzled media by a 27-year-old Chicago player since Carlos Zambrano told a rumpled scribe in 2009 that he looked like he sleeps under a bridge.

Said Giolito without a hint of sarcasm or animus: “I’m on the wrong side of 25 now, but I do feel young still.”

Kids say the darndest things.

Probably time for today’s nap on the wrong side of that bridge, anyway.

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