CHICAGO – Even for a team with a record of futility unmatched in professional baseball, this season has been one of the most dismal in Cubs history.

About the only good thing that could be said about a team poised to lose 100 games for the first time in 46 years – one of which came after the shortstop trotted off the field thinking there were three outs instead of two – is that the ugly baseball, at home anyway, is being played in front of fewer fans than in any year in the past decade.

“I’ve never seen the kinds of holes (empty seats) that I’ve seen this year,” said Kate Dahl, a bartender at Murphy’s Bleachers, across the street from Wrigley Field, where attendance will not reach the 3 million mark for the first time since 2003. “People can’t give tickets away and the ushers aren’t even stopping people from moving down into the box seats.”