In Chicago, Danny Ecker noted Thursday night’s Cubs-White Sox game at U.S. Cellular Field was played before 26,332 fans, “one of the smallest crowds in the history of the series.” The record for smallest was “set the night before,” bringing the “final average paid attendance for the four-game series to 28,715.” That marked the “fourth-straight season of declining ticket sales for Cubs-Sox games.” It also is 8% lower than last year's average, when the series was switched from six games to four and moved to earlier in the season (CHICAGOBUSINESS.com, 5/9).
WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE MY NEIGHBOR?: In Jacksonville, Don Coble noted the PGA Tour and the Jaguars “clearly are comfortable working together,” as the NFL team was “doing business” at The Players Championship this weekend. Jaguars players mingled with “current and prospective customers of the Jaguars." The Jaguars Den towers were set “high above the 17th tee at the TPC Sawgrass Players Stadium Course.” Jaguars President Mark Lamping said, “The tournament is too great an opportunity not to take advantage of it.” Meanwhile, the PGA Tour owns a skybox at EverBank Field, and it has "become a popular way for the Tour to entertain its sponsors, current and potential, in a different kind of stadium-like atmosphere” (FLORIDA TIMES-UNION, 5/11).
GARDEN VARIETY: In N.Y. Larry Brooks wrote during the Stanley Cup playoffs, the renovations at MSG transformed the arena “into a place without a voice, a place without a pulse and a place in which the home team has no home-ice advantage whatsoever.” Brooks: “What I see and hear is a crowd at the Garden that is in a perpetual thumbs-down mode and creates an atmosphere that sucks the air right out of the game. … Where is the seventh man here? Off in the spanking new concourse purchasing the world’s most expensive hamburger?” (N.Y. POST, 5/11). However, on Long Island, Mark Herrmann writes for the “first time this postseason,” MSG last night “rocked with energy and electricity.” Feelings “ran deep” for Rangers RW Martin St. Louis, who played just three days after his mother died from a heart attack (NEWSDAY, 5/12).
