Major League Baseball today officially declared an end to the 2009 season today by releasing the Cubs 2010 schedule. Interleague play features visits from the Oakland A’s, California Angels, and of course the White Sox. The Cubs will go on the road to Seattle, where Ichiro Suzuki is expected to get 8 or 10 hits in the three-game late-June series.
Scalpers can look forward to the final series of the season the last weekend of September, when St. Louis plans to clinch its second Central Division title in as many years.
“Busloads of these hayseed Missouri types arrive, sometimes without tickets,” said one street scalper who asked to remain anonymous. “They’re like, all, “Show Me” and stuff, and we just pass some high-quality xerox copies off on ’em and split for the L & L before they get to the gate. Easy money, man. Not like those South Siders—-they’ll cut you.”
Wrigley street vendors, who may be legally barred from the area by the 2010 opener, express hope that their obscene, racist, sexist and double-entendre T-shirts will still be available for sale to inebriated Cubs fans, most of whom will be too embarrassed to actually put the clothes on after sobering up. But these small-scale capitalists realize that they’re at the mercy of the political winds.
“We tried blackmailing the alderman with pictures of him holding hands with a guy, but apparently he’s okay with that,” said one vendor as he scurried away from the Wrigley Firehouse entrance.
By Bill Savage, Heckler reader and baseball expert
