Jonathan Berr Posts

Tickets for the World Series are as good as gold -- literally.

Worries about the economy have pushed up prices for the precious metal above $1,000 an ounce, a level many fans are willing to pay for good tickets to baseball's championship, which starts Wednesday in New York.

The ticket search engine FanSnap.com estimates that some ticket sellers are asking more than $1,600 for Game 3 of the showdown between the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, greater than the cost of a pair of pearl earrings ($660) round-trip airfare between the city of Brotherly Love and Tokyo ($778) or a half-pound of frozen gourmet white truffles ($1,300).

Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig likes what he sees in his crystal ball for next season.

According to Sports Business Journal, Selig is predicting a rebound in 2010 from this year's attendance decline of 6.65 percent to 73.42 million, a season in which 22 of 30 teams posted drop-offs in attendance.

The reason for Selig's optimism is the improvement in the economy, including the 13 percent increase this year in the Dow Jones industrial average. Some experts, though, are arguing that the improvements may be short-lived because unemployment is continuing to rise. Many have argued that the economic recovery in the U.S. will be painfully slow to help many Americans hurt by the recession.

The Winter Classic, the NHL's homage to hockey in its raw, natural outdoor form, is continuing to grow in popularity.

According to the NHL, registrations for tickets to the 2010 New Year's Day game surpassed 307,000. The game will be played at Boston's Fenway Park, which has a capacity of about 40,000 for the game.

Registrations were up 25 percent from last year's contest between the Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks in Wrigley Field.

Monday night's Brett Favre soap opera set a record as the most watched cable telecast ever.

Neilsen Media Research estimates that some 21.8 million people watched Favre's Minnesota Vikings defeat his old team, the Green Bay Packers, 30-23, giving it a national rating of 13.2. Not surprisingly, the game did a 58.3 rating in Minneapolis and a 49.7 rating in Green Bay.

The ratings should give a shot in the arm to ESPN and its corporate parent, the Walt Disney Co., which moved the program to ESPN in 2005 after 36 years on the ABC network. The entertainment conglomerate has long viewed ESPN as a cash cow.

Ted Williams has had a rough afterlife.

First his kids fought over whether his remains should be frozen like a Popsicle for eternity or until they found a cure for all diseases -- whichever came first. Williams, baseball's last .400 hitter, was reduced to a punch line for late-night TV comics. Now, the memory of one of game's greatest hitters is tarnished again.

After he died in 2002, Williams' body was sent to an Arizona cryogenics facility called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation at the direction of his son John Henry Williams. The New York Daily News is reporting that a soon-to-be published book, "Frozen," written by Larry Johnson, a former exec at Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona, describes how the Boston Red Sox' star was beheaded, his head frozen and repeatedly abused.