New Braves stadium to hike ticket prices 45%, Braves say this is because seats will be 45% better

The Atlanta Braves have released ticket prices for their new stadium in Cobb County, and fans can expect to absorb a whopping 45% price increase over Turner Field. Also, only a 4.7% price increase over Turner Field. Whaaa?

Turner Field features the third-cheapest price among Major League Baseball teams for non-premium season tickets at $19.14 per game, according to Team Marketing Report of Chicago, which uses data from all 30 MLB teams. The league average is about $29.

The Braves, however, say their average non-premium price is actually higher — $26.48. The Team Marketing Report survey excludes seats near the field and in other prime areas that wouldn’t be considered premium in a modern stadium. That effectively depresses Turner Field’s average.

The average non-premium seat cost at the new Cobb County ballpark is expected to be $27.73, according to a Braves spokeswoman. That would be a 45 percent increase over the Team Marketing Report average for Turner Field, but only a 4.7 percent increase over what the Braves consider their average price.

All of this mostly goes to show how hard it is to define “ticket price” in a 21st-century landscape of amenity-filled club seats and dynamic pricing. (The prices released by the Braves yesterday are just for season tickets; no one knows how individual games will be priced.) TMR divides up its pricing data into “general” and “premium” seating — the latter for “club seats or any section that has special features,” which is clear as mud — which allows teams to claim that a share of a price increase is due to added amenities, kind of the way that poverty isn’t a problem because poor people now have refrigerators.

The Braves, meanwhile, claim that you can’t compare seats at the old and new stadiums at all, because the new one will offer (in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s paraphrase) “

 

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4 comments on “New Braves stadium to hike ticket prices 45%, Braves say this is because seats will be 45% better

  1. I can only imagine how much comfortable the seating will be at the new stadium. I visited Turner Field in 1999 and was “blown away” at the size of the seats and leg room compared to the seats I occupied at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. To this day it’s a topic of discussion when discussing comfort levels of seating at Major League Baseball stadiums. I’m guessing more comfortable means reclining seats and foot rests for us commoners that don’t have corporate backing for our seats?

  2. It’s been quite a while since I studied General and Special Relativity in college… but does this quantum improvement in fan experience mean that the Braves themselves will have to be 55% (or maybe 110%) worse in order to maintain some sort of sporting world equilibrium?

  3. No, no, relativity and quantum dynamics are two different things. As Einstein famously said, “God can’t predict baseball.”

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