Where to Sit at Wrigley Field

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Wrigley Field’s bowl was rebuilt in pieces during the 1060 Project (2014 to 2019), but the core decisions for a visiting fan are the same as they have been for decades. The bleachers are general admission within most of their footprint and are their own seating culture. The rooftops across Sheffield and Waveland are a completely separate ticket category (you don’t get into the park with one). For a summer day game, you need a row with a deck over it, since the baseline you sit along will not keep you out of the sun. The bleachers and the right field end of the upper deck take the last of the setting sun on summer night games. Premium clubs (Catalina, W, 1914, Maker’s Mark Barrel Room) are all-inclusive and worth pricing against the cost of an equivalent night out on Clark Street.

The seating bowl

After the 1060 Project, the bowl from the field up is roughly:

Club Box (sections 3 to 32). The rows closest to the field, running from the left field corner around to the right field corner. The Cubs split it into Home Plate (13 to 22), Infield (8 to 12 and 23 to 27), and Outfield (3 to 7 and 28 to 32). Bullpen Box is rows 1 to 4 of sections 6, 7, 30, and 31, right next to the bullpens.

Field Box (sections 101 to 134). The next ring back in the lower bowl, split the same way: Home Plate (112 to 122), Infield (109 to 111 and 123 to 126), and Outfield (101 to 108 and 127 to 134).

Terrace (sections 202 to 233). The back of the lower bowl, tucked under the upper deck. Terrace Box is rows 1 to 6, and Terrace Reserved is behind it. Rows 7 to 13 of sections 209 to 226 are sold as Terrace Reserved Preferred.

Upper deck (300 and 400 levels). Upper Box in the 300s (303L to 331R) for the front of the upper deck, and Upper Reserved in the 400s (403L to 431R) for the back rows. The 400-level seats are among the cheapest in the regular bowl and the farthest from the action.

Bleacher Box. Reserved seats along the outfield walls in the bleachers, a separate category from general bleacher admission.

Bleachers (500 level on the bleacher chart). General admission within most of the bleacher footprint. Wrap the entire outfield, left to right. Bench seating without backrests.

Premium clubs. Catalina Club, 1914 Club, W Club, Maker’s Mark Barrel Room, eero Club. These are all-inclusive and bundle the seat with food and beverage.

The bleachers as their own seating culture

The Wrigley bleachers are the only seats at the park that come with a defining fan culture attached. The “Bleacher Bums” name dates to 1969, when a group of regulars in the left field bleachers led by Ron Grace adopted the name, wore yellow hard hats, and became part of Cubs lore during the late-summer collapse of that season. The name was later attached to a 1977 stage play co-written by Joe Mantegna. Through generations of fans, the bleachers have stayed loud, opinionated, and self-policing.

The bleachers are one of the best seats at Wrigley Field. Get there when the gates open, take a spot, watch batting practice, and spend nine innings with people who came to do exactly what you came to do. The premium clubs are more comfortable and they cost multiples of this, and we would still take the bleachers.

They come with a few downsides.

• The benches have no backs. Nine innings on aluminum with nothing to lean against adds up, and you feel it by the 7th.
• A day game is a sunburn. The bleachers are uncovered and they face back toward home plate, which in a July afternoon means you are looking into the sun for most of the game.
• It is not the family section. The bleacher bums are drinking, and somewhere out there a beer snake is under construction. If you have a seven-year-old, this is not where you sit.
• Restrooms are concentrated in center field down the bleacher concourse, and the lines build on a busy day game.
• General admission within the bleacher footprint. Your ticket gets you in and you pick an open spot first-come, so get there early.

On the backrest problem: a soft, flat foam cushion is fine to bring in. A folding stadium seat with a metal frame, hard sides, or a backrest is not.

Front row in left and right is prime home-run territory, and it is where the throw-it-back tradition gets loudest.

The Bleacher Box

The Bleacher Box is a separate ticketed category along the outfield walls in the bleachers, distinct from general bleacher admission. Bleacher Box seats are reserved and sit closer to the field than the GA rows behind them.

The Bleacher Suite

The Bleacher Suite is a private hospitality space inside the bleachers, sold as a group buyout with food and beverage included. It is not part of the bench seating area.

The Budweiser Patio

The Budweiser Patio is a standing-room and table area in the right-center field bleachers, branded with Budweiser since the 2014 Anheuser-Busch partnership. It has historically corresponded to sections in the 510s along the back of the right-center bleachers.

The throw-it-back tradition

If an opposing player hits a home run into the bleachers and you catch it, the bleacher culture expects you to throw it back onto the field. The expectation is enforced socially. A fan who keeps the ball will be booed loudly by surrounding sections until the ball goes back.

Keep Cubs home run balls. Throw opposing home run balls. That is the whole rule and the bleachers will make sure you know it.

You will read elsewhere that the trick is to carry a decoy ball in your pocket, hold up the real one so your neighbors see the catch, then throw the decoy and keep the souvenir. People really do this. It has been done a few feet from us. The odds that you personally catch an opposing player’s home run on the one day you are at Wrigley are somewhere between slim and none. Do not pack a baseball. Just know why the whole section is yelling if it ever happens to you.

The basket and the ivy ground rules

The wire basket atop the outfield wall was installed in 1970 as a fan-safety measure after a string of late-1960s incidents in which fans climbed down from the bleachers and ran onto the warning track during games. The basket projects out roughly 42 inches from the top of the brick wall and counts as out of play.

Ground rules to know:

• A batted ball that lands in the basket on the fly is a home run. The basket extends the home run line out from the wall.
• A batted ball that lodges in the ivy on the wall is a ground-rule double. The outfielder raises both hands to signal the umpire, and the play is dead with the batter awarded a ground-rule double.
• If the outfielder reaches into the ivy to retrieve the ball instead of raising hands, the ball remains live and runners can keep advancing. Outfielders are coached to play the carom when the ball comes off the brick because raising the hands gives up the chance at a play.

The rooftops across Sheffield and Waveland

The rooftop seats on the buildings across Sheffield Avenue (right field) and Waveland Avenue (left field) are unique to Wrigley among current major-league ballparks. The setup developed organically: tenement buildings across the street had clear sightlines over the outfield walls, owners installed permanent bleachers on the roofs, and a separate ticketed product emerged.

A few things to get straight before buying a rooftop ticket

Rooftop tickets and Cubs tickets are entirely separate. A rooftop ticket gets you onto the rooftop building across the street. It does not get you into Wrigley Field itself. If you want to be inside the park, you buy a Cubs ticket. If you want to be on a rooftop, you buy a rooftop ticket. Going from one to the other means leaving and re-entering through a different gate at a different address.

The Ricketts family owns most of the rooftops. Wrigley Rooftops LLC, an entity affiliated with the Cubs ownership group, acquired most of the Sheffield and Waveland rooftop properties through a wave of acquisitions from roughly 2013 through 2016. A small number of properties have historically operated outside that ownership.

Packages are all-inclusive. Rooftop tickets bundle the seat with food and beverage. Buffets typically include ballpark fare (hot dogs, burgers, sausages, sides, dessert). Beverage packages typically include domestic beer, wine, and soft drinks, with premium liquor often available as an upgrade.

Pricing runs higher than a typical bleacher ticket. Recent ranges have run from roughly $200 per person for lower-demand weekday games up to $500 or more per person for marquee opponents and postseason games, with private buyouts running well into five figures.

Which side faces what

Sheffield Avenue rooftops (3617 through 3643 N Sheffield) sit across the street from the right field corner and right field bleachers. They look toward right field and home plate from the right field side.

Waveland Avenue rooftops (1032 through 1048 W Waveland) sit across the street from the left field corner and left field bleachers. They look toward left field and home plate from the left field side.

Rooftops closer to the foul-pole corners have shallower angles into the park. Rooftops closer to straightaway outfield have flatter, more head-on views. The right answer depends on whether you want the wide-angle scene with the bleachers in the foreground (corner rooftops) or the more direct look at the action (deeper rooftops).

Sun and shade

The field runs northeast from home plate. At a 1:20 start in July the sun opens the game behind home plate and finishes the afternoon behind the third-base stands, 67 degrees up at first pitch and still better than 40 at the last out. It stays high enough all afternoon that only the rows tucked directly under a deck get shade, so pick your row for what is above it. The Terrace (the 200s, under the upper deck) stays in the shade all game, and so do most of the Upper Reserved seats in the 400s. The Club Box and the bleachers have nothing overhead and stay in the sun all afternoon, and the bleachers face back toward home plate, which through a July afternoon means looking straight into the sun. The Field Box starts the game mostly in the sun. Its left field end, sections 101 to 112, falls into shade over the first two hours, and the right field corner, 129 to 134, stays sunny the whole way. The Upper Box in the 300s is part sun and part shade, and its left field end is the shadiest. At a 7:05 start in summer the sun is low off the third-base side and setting, so the lower bowl is already in shade at first pitch. The light that is left lands on the bleachers and the right field end of the upper deck, about sections 322 to 331 and 425 to 431, for the first hour or so. In April that makes those seats the warm ones rather than the ones to avoid. For your own date and start time, check the Bleacher Bound SunTracker before you buy.

Premium clubs

The Cubs operate several premium clubs at Wrigley. All bundle the seat with all-inclusive food and beverage, and most sit behind home plate. Naming rights change with sponsor turnover, so confirm the current names on Cubs.com before you buy.

Catalina Club

Named for Santa Catalina Island, the Cubs’ historical spring training home from 1921 through 1951 (during the William Wrigley Jr. ownership). Currently sponsored as the James Hardie Catalina Club, a premium indoor space with all-inclusive food and beverage, and the corresponding seats are in a designated premium section.

W Club

Named after the W flag flown after Cubs wins. Currently sponsored as The W Club powered by Gordon Flesch Company, a hospitality area with all-inclusive food and premium beverage, with tickets bundling club access with seats in a designated premium section.

1914 Club

A behind-home-plate field-level club, named for the year Wrigley opened. Now sponsored as the AbbVie 1914 Club. Includes access to a private dining room beneath the seats and the first several rows directly behind home plate, with all-inclusive food and beverage.

Maker’s Mark Barrel Room

An underground club space beneath the seats near home plate, themed around the Maker’s Mark bourbon program. Opened as part of the 1060 Project and connects to certain premium seat inventory.

eero Club

A suite-level club (also called the Executive Club) with all-inclusive food, beer, wine, and non-alcoholic drinks, sponsored by eero.

For a visiting fan, premium clubs are worth pricing against a comparable night out on Clark Street plus standard tickets. For a group on a marquee weekend who would have eaten and drunk before the game anyway, the all-inclusive ticket can come out close to break-even and the seat upgrade is real.

Rows under the upper deck

The poles get all the warnings, and the ceiling is the thing that will actually ruin a lower-bowl ticket at Wrigley.

Sit far enough back under the upper deck and the deck stops being shade and starts being a lid. Your view of the field is fine. Your view of everything else is gone: no scoreboard, no skyline over the bleachers, no sky. At Wrigley that matters more than it would anywhere else, because the scoreboard and the ivy and the neighborhood over the wall are most of what you paid the premium for.

So if you are spending up for the lower bowl, spend it on a row that is not under the upper deck, or only partly under it. That is worth more than a few rows of proximity.

The exception is a July afternoon, when the same overhang is the only shade in the building and you will be grateful for the lid. On a hot day game, the best seats are in the front portion of a section that the deck reaches, roughly the front quarter of it, where you are covered but not buried.

The poles

Wrigley is a 1914 ballpark and the upper deck is held up by steel posts that stand in the lower bowl. Some seats in the 200 level are obstructed. Rows 1 to 5 don’t have an obstruction, and from row 6 back you may have a partial one.

The Cubs discount those seats and flag them as limited view in the Cubs.com selection tool, and the reasonable expectation is that a legitimate marketplace discloses it too. But plenty of ordinary post obstruction exists below the level of “you are staring at a pole,” and it clusters in the back rows of the Terrace where the posts and the overhang both live. Which is the same place the lid problem lives, so the fix is the same fix.

Buy the front of a section rather than the back and most of this takes care of itself. If you are on a secondary marketplace, pull up the seat photos on Cubs.com first. A discounted obstructed-view ticket is a real bargain when you know what you bought and a bad afternoon when you don’t.

How to find the right ticket

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Demand for Cubs tickets depends mostly on the opponent and the day of the week.

• Marquee opponents (Yankees, Dodgers, Cardinals weekend series, Crosstown Classic vs. White Sox) draw the biggest crowds. Add those games to your watch list.
• Weeknight games against weaker draws tend to be the easier tickets.
• Bleacher general admission is still a big-crowd ticket on a Yankees Saturday.
• Day games are still the Wrigley default because of the city ordinance. If you have flexibility, a Wednesday 1:20 p.m. is often a smoother experience than a packed Saturday night.

Know Wrigley Field better than we do? Tell us what we got wrong, or where we should be sending people instead.

Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you book through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend.