The story of the man that was traded for himself

His name was Dickie Noles, and the Cubs once traded him to the Tigers for...Dickie Noles.

That's today's Tale from a Bad Century.

E-mails, we get e-mails...

"BP" writes...

"Rick, I just finished a book called Scorecasting. It’s Freakonomics for sports. They debunk a lot of sports myths like the hot shooting hand in basketball, why there is a home field advantage and why going for it on 4th down is always a good strategy. The last chapter concerns the Cubs and whether they are cursed. They go off on a tangent on ticket prices and find that while most MLB teams can track ticket sales closely to winning, the Cubs ticket sales are not related to winning. In fact, ticket sales have gone up when the Cubs were losing the most. The one factor that they found that tracks ticket sales is BEER PRICES at Wrigley. Beer goes up, people stay away. Which is why Wrigley has some of the cheapest beer in MLB."

Interesting indeed. I really never considered $7 beer cheap, but now that you mention it, I think it was $9.50 in Colorado when I went to a game there a couple of summers ago. By the way, I went to Wrigley this weekend and had a non-alcoholic beer (yes, they have them). It was only $3.50.