By Bob Markus

It wasn't always this way. Frank Maloney can remember the days when he would go onto the nearby Addison Street "L" platform and virtually beg waiting passengers to visit Wrigley
field to see a Cubs game. That was during the period when Cubs' manager Lee Elia famously ranted: "Eighty-five per cent of the people have jobs; the other 15 per cent come out here and boo the Cubs."

Now, as the Cubs prepare to open the National league playoffs Wednesday against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Maloney, the Cubs' longtime ticket manager, just has to worry how he's going to accommodate everybody clammoring for tickets to the greatest show on earth--the Cubs' quest to end a century of failure by, at long last, winning the World Series. The players may have the easier job. "When we got in the playoffs in'84," Maloney recalls, "I could help practically everybody. But now everybody wants to go to these games."

Maloney came to the Cubs in 1981, a pivotal year in Cubs' history. In a strike-shortened season, the Cubs averaged a little better than 10,000 fans a game and by the time play was resumed following the lengthy walkout, the team had been sold to Chicago Tribune Company. Now, with new Tribune owner Sam Zell apparently intent on selling the team, every game is a sellout of more than 40,000 and, beginning in 2004, the yearly attendance has exceeded three million--even in 2006, when the team lost 96 games.

"In those early days," recalled Maloney, "the upper deck was not open. We had 4,000 season ticket holders. Today we have 28,000 and there is a waiting list of 90,000. " The Cubs could, of course, probably sell out the entire ball park for the season, but to do so might have a negative impact on future fans. The team used to advertise that 10,000 seats would go on sale the day of every game. "That's just not good business practice," says Maloney. "You can't be holding back 10,000 seats for day of game sale." Today there are no game day sales at the box office. Every available seat was gone within a week of being put on sale last February. "People were camping out overnight," Maloney recalls.

Maloney lists several factors in transforming Wrigley Field from a neighborhood park to a national shrine. "When I first came here," he offers, "the neighborhood was kind of questionable as to whether it was going to become slummy. Then early in the 1980s the Yuppies started coming in and along with them came restaurants and bars. Second was Harry Caray. He was enormously important. He really sold this place. The third thing was cable TV. When cable came the Sox decided to try it; they left WGN-TV and that left it wide open for us."

Even Maloney admits to being amazed that so many people can afford to visit the north side temple of baseball, given the high cost of tickets. The Cubs have some seats called dugout boxes that go for $200 each and the rest of the field level boxes go for $80. For the division series the prices will range from $100 to $25, with world series seats, should the Cubs get that far, much higher.

"It's really difficult for the average guy to bring his kids out to the ball park," acknowledges Maloney. "I don't know if I could go out and do that. The other side of the coin is that no matter how high we raise the prices, there's a frenzy to buy them. But we aren't the priciest team in baseball. In the new Yankee Stadium some of the seats will go for $2,500."

By rights, Maloney should probably be working for the White Sox. A south sider, he was a center and line backer at Mt.Carmel High school back in the days when the Caravan was dominating the area prep scene. After playing for Bump Elliott at Michigan, where he was "mediocre at best," he enrolled in law school at Northwestern. But he also served as a volunteer coach at his old high school and when the head coach left, Maloney, at 21, was offered the head coaching job.

Several years earlier another young Mt. Carmel coach, Terry Brennan, had gone back to his alma mater, Notre Dame, where he replaced a legend, Frank Leahy. Maloney followed a somewhat similar career path. He coached Mt. Carmel for six years and, after winning the city championship game over Dunbar before 65,000 fans in Soldier Field, went back to Michigan as offensive line coach for Elliott. That was in 1968 and, despite going 8-2, Elliott was fired after that season for the egregious sin of being blown out by Ohio State, 50-14, in the final game. "Bo (Schembechler) came in and kept two of us assistants," remembers Maloney. "I became defensive line coach and was with Bo for five years."

Obviously, Maloney was not going to replace Schembechler at his alma mater, but he did replace a legendary coach, Ben Schwartzwalder, at Syracuse. In a quarter of a century at Syracuse, Schwartzwalder produced one national championship and two of the greatest running backs in the history of football, Jim Brown and Ernie Davis. But he went 2-9 in his final season and Maloney was brought in to get the Orangemen back on track.

He never really did. In his best season he went 7-5, including a victory in the Independance bowl, Syracuse's first postseason appearance in 13 years. He turned out some outstanding players, including NFL Hall of Famer Art Monk, who years later invited Maloney to his induction ceremony. He surrounded himself with some outstanding young assistants--Tom Coughlin, Nick Saban, George O'Leary, Jerry Angelo, all of whom became well-known head coaches or, in Angelo's case, an NFL general manager. "We had a good go," he says. But after seven years he was fired and "I made the decision not to coach any more. I was from the old school--hard-nosed--and that doesn't fly now. I had some chances. I could have gone here; I could have gone there. After I'd been with the Cubs one year I had a chance to go to Green Bay as an assistant. "

He's never regretted his decision to stay with the Cubs. "I'm the luckiet guy in the world," he says, "just being in this ball park and seeing people. The other day a kid who played for me at Mt. Carmel called. I hadn't seen him for 30 years."

I imagine that, in the coming few weeks, Maloney will be hearing from a lot of people he hasn't seen in 30 years.