CHICAGO—According to a statement released Thursday by the Chicago Cubs front office, fans of the 136-year-old baseball franchise are now too fat to attend home games.
The statement—which confirmed that members of the team's fan base are no longer able to fit into stadium seating and, even if they could, are physically unable to walk up the number of steps necessary to get to their seats—confirmed that Wrigley Field would temporarily close until alterations could be made to accommodate the obese fans.
"The average weight of a Cubs fan is between 375 and 425 pounds," team president Theo Epstein said in the statement, adding that while there are still a few fans whose weight does not prevent them from attending games, there aren't nearly enough to fill the seats, because all of them are tourists. "One person filling up two or three seats throughout the entire bleacher section is not a sustainable business model. And we don't have enough room to accommodate all of our fans' motorized scooters."
"The bottom line is that Wrigley is an old stadium never intended to hold 41,000 morbidly obese people," Epstein continued. "If we keep forcing it to support that much weight, it could very well collapse."
