Category: ticket prices

If you’ve been wondering what those crazy-expensive field-level seats are like at Fake Yankee Stadium, ESPN writer Wright Thompson dropped $1200 so he could tell you firsthand. His verdict: It’s great to watch the game from up close, hot dogs go great with a $200 bottle of French wine, and cops are nicer to you when they think you’re rich people.

Thompson comes up with a novel theory for the outrageous Yankees ticket prices, saying it’s thanks to Wall Street brokers who in recent years became willing to pay just about anything for good tickets, since they were using them as deductible entertainment expenses (Thompson calls them “bribes”) to sweet-talk other brokers into conducting deals. But after a bunch of equity traders were caught with free hotel rooms, hookers, and a midget — it’s always the midget that gets the headlines — the SEC cracked down, with potentiall huge consequences for the Yankees:

To get out front of the SEC, many firms have instituted their own internal controls requiring gifts worth more than $100 to be reported. A computer program has been purchased by more than 200 companies that, for the first time, allows statistics to be kept on ticket use, including how much business each one brings in.

So … just as companies were trying to limit extravagant spending, the Yankees came out with the most extravagant tickets in the history of sports, designed in part for a group of people who could no longer buy them. “They killed the golden goose,” a former Bear Stearns guy says. “When the new prices came out, everybody said, ‘Are you kidding? We can’t even give these to clients.'” …

Yankees games went from something small to something like a trip to the Masters. One buy-sider told me: “I’ve been offered really good seats a couple of times, but I haven’t taken tickets from a broker in the new stadium. I’d feel like I owed the guy.”

Meanwhile, Thompson wonders if all the sky-high ticket pricing could risk turning off those who are there for the game, not for the derivatives. He cites ESPN pollster Rich Luker as saying the sports industry is in “harvest mode,” and could be in danger of alienating its fan base for good:

A recent poll discovered an unsettling trend emerging for the first time. American families whose household income is $75,000 or less now have zero dollars of discretionary income. According to Luker, that means about 75 percent of the country can never responsibly afford to go to a live professional sporting event. Franchises want them to be fans, to buy the gear and pull for their teams and watch the telecasts the leagues are paid billions for. But they don’t need them to come to their stadiums. There are, right now, plenty of rich people who love games. The prices reflect that. The reason sporting events cost so much now, Luker’s research shows, is because they are designed to be affordable only to those making $150,000 or more a year.

Luker’s stats show, continues Thompson: “For the first time, the largest number of sports fans aren’t 12- to 17-year-old boys. The baby boomers are the group that shows the greatest increase in a love of sports, and they’ll be dying soon.”

All in all, a fascinating read, though I’m not entirely sure about all its conclusions. (My own research points to the massive surge in wealth towards the richest Americans since the Reagan tax cuts for the top income brackets — the increase in in the number of “rich people who love games,” in other words — as most to blame for rising ticket prices.) And it’s fun to hear about such perks as about the bottomless pile of Twizzlers available to high rollers, without having to plunk down $1200 to visit it.

The long-awaited decision by the New York Yankees on how to respond to their empty seat crisis is in, and the verdict is: The team is cutting ticket prices on about 6,400 of their priciest seats, while raising prices on 1,700 second-deck seats:

3,400 Field Level seats currently priced at $325 as part of full-season licenses will drop to $250 or $235 each next season, depending on their specific location. Additionally, all 1,208 Suite seats in the Delta Sky 360¬∞ Suite will see a decrease in price, as will 1,846 of 1,894 Suite seats (97 percent) in the Legends Suite. The balance of the Legends Suite seats will have no price change….

In the Main Level, 10,111 seat locations will see no increase. The remaining 1,704 seats in Sections 216-217 and 223-224 currently priced at $100 will be $125 next season. These mark the only increases for 2010.

The lesson the Yankees seem to have learned here: Fans aren’t willing to pay an arm and a leg for great seats, but will give up a few fingers for good ones. Which makes sense, given that the most expensive seats are the ones that were going unsold, but is almost certainly bad news for fans hoping for more cheap seats, not more $100-$300 ones.

In related news, random Yankee fans with no last names think these prices are still too damned expensive.

Today’s New York Times notes that while the Yankees will be offering Division Series seats to season ticket holders at regular-season prices, they’ll be several dollars higher for non-season plan holders lucky enough to win the ticket lottery. (All tickets will also carry a mandatory MLB “handling fee” of between $1 and $6 for all, because you don’t expect Bud Selig to run his greasy fingers over everything for nothing, right?) This suggests one possible reason why the Yanks are keeping first-round ticket prices low: They may be worried about season-ticket renewals in the wake of all the uproar over this year’s crazy price hikes (86% on average, according to the Times), and are hoping that the guarantee of discounted postseason tickets will be enough to lure fans back for 2010.

In any case, this should be one more data point in rebuttal of any notion that sports ticket prices are set according to some rational analysis of supply and demand — as my six-year-old says about the weather forecasts, “They’re just guessing.” And right now with everyone guessing about so many other things, it makes sense to expect some weirdness in ticket pricing, too.

Is it opposite week at New York Yankees HQ or what? First the team relents and allows fans to bring small bags to the games, now comes word that they’re lowering postseason ticket prices from what they’d planning on last year, with tickets for the Division Series largely unchanged from regular-season levels. Either they know something about the recession that we don’t, or they’re planning to make it back on $12 popcorn buckets. Or maybe they’re just hoping to make up the difference in StubHub fees.

UPDATE: New Stadium Insider notes that with the smaller capacity of Fake Yankee Stadium, larger season-ticket base, and required set-asides for MLB and the media, fewer than 5,000 tickets will be available to the general public for the ALDS (and fewer than 1,000 for the World Series). Still, a break to season ticket holders is still a break — and the relative scarcity of generally available tickets only makes it weirder that the Yanks are passing up the chance to ask for the moon.

CNBC’s Darren Rovell reports that the New York Yankees have cut prices on some of their highest-priced seats in an attempt to fill those embarassing empty sections at their new stadium:

The $2,500 per game seats, that weren’t selling as the Yanks had hoped, will now cost $1,250 per game.

The $1,000 per game seats will now cost $650 per game.

Fans who already purchased these seats on a season basis at their old value can either get a credit on the difference or a refund.

Rovell says “about 600” seats are affected, so it’s safe to assume that most of the muckety-mucks in the “Legends Suites” won’t be looking at refunds, only those who until now had bare plastic for neighbors. (The official press release seems to confirm this, but I’m not gonna be the one to sit with a seating chart and decode it.) It remains to be seen whether the blizzard of press attention this is sure to get helps the Yanks look less greedy, or merely feeds the fire of the public’s schadenfreude.

Meanwhile, New Stadium Insider, which posted the press release above, also analyzed the available Yankees seats listed on FanSnap.com and came up with this:

Doing math based on the rounded numbers of tickets available according to the site (which does not include all ticket brokers, or Craigs List), an average of 16,900 Yankee tickets are available on the secondary market for each game. In other words, 35% of the per-game inventory sold by the Yankees is now back on the market, presumably with the intent of making a profit.

Whether the buyers will be able to make their money back is as yet unclear; NSI notes that some tickets are selling at above face value, but also that plenty of other people are dumping tickets for next to nothing. Too bad there’s no way to see “Completed Sales” on StubHub.