Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
February 14, 2005
Selling Tickets

Lynne Kiesling is one of my favorite bloggers on economic and energy issues. She has a great post wondering why tickets still have face value.

Teams make money from attendance in two ways; the money they glean from the ticket sale, and the money the fans spend at the park. If teams could put more fannies in the seats with a double auction system, why not? Maybe they make back the money lost in ticket prices with increased parking and hot dog revenues. For teams that do sell out, they would make even more money, since they haven't hit the price point where people are unwilling to attend games. (Just look at a ticket broker sometime for the price of Red Sox tickets.)

It will be interesting to see if one of the Moneyball GMs figures this out and starts selling all their tickets on E-Bay.


Posted by David Pinto at 10:52 AM | Management | TrackBack (0)
Comments

The Cubs already scalp their own tickets to fans. The Red Sox have scalpers, on the other hand, who are "criminals" of the "organized" variety, which might be why the team seems afraid to touch that issue.

I think in the end teams may be afraid of totally alienating regular fans - to the extent that a relatively affordable "face value" exists, even if it is rarely what the fan actually pays, it creates the illusion of accessibility to at least middle class fans who save for it. If a team were to openly charge hundreds of dollars apiece for tickets all the time, they would take a massive PR hit.

I do think, however, in the Red Sox case, that the gap between market price and face value is so obviously large that fans might accept a switch to market pricing - everybody knows that is what you end up paying anyway, so the team might as well get the revenue instead of Whitey Bulger's crew. If the team demonstrated that the extra revenue wasn't simply being pocketed, a savvy ownership group could probably sell the change.

Posted by: Matt Davis at February 14, 2005 11:16 AM

Also, if the team were making lots more money on high-end tickets, there's no reason they couldn't set aside some bleacher seats for children's programs (Little League, Boys and Girls Clubs, etc.)

Posted by: David Pinto at February 14, 2005 11:32 AM

In Illinois it is illegal to sell tickets at larger than face value. This would prevent the Cubs and Sox from doing this in an up front way.

The Cubs skirt around this issue by owning their own ticket brokerage firm which is the only ticket broker in the world that can return tickets they purchased before the event occurs for a refund, as well as order the tickets without waiting in line with the rest of the general public. It's an obvious scam that somehow a judge said was legal.

Frankly I've thought your system made sense for a while, especially when you factor in fans could get bargain sits for unwanted games (Pirates in April) and the club could make huge money on big games (interleague rivals). It's fair to both parties - market value after all.

Posted by: Eric S at February 14, 2005 02:07 PM
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