I know that Yankee ticket sales are down this year, so I was curious to see what the demand would be for Old Timers’ Day. After all, there are two games that you can always figure will be sellouts: that and Opening Day. It used to be that I wouldn’t even try to get OTD tix, because they were so hard to get.
Anyhow, I was surprised to find out last week that there were literally thousands of good (and not so good!) seats available for the game. Not only that, but there were a slew of tickets below face value at StubHub. And at the Yankees Ticket Exchange!
Yes, you heard that right. Remember that the ticket exchange, unlike StubHub, has a ticket floor. And that had generally been face value. Now the floor is lower. Much lower. I saw tickets as cheap as $8 for Old Timers’ Day, and for $6 for some other games! In fact, there has been speculation that the Yankees themselves are selling their own tickets online in the ticket exchange; Yankee fans online have pointed out that they’ve seen entire groups of tickets go on sale at once there.
Not all tickets are such good deals. Things like Yankees-Red Sox still seem to be face value or more at this point. But generally speaking, the ticket exchange has bleacher tickets starting at around $8 ($6 on StubHub) and $10 for grandstand seats ($8 on StubHub). So for $2 extra a ticket, fans may be tempted to buy at the Ticket Exchange, especially when trekking to the StubHub office in the Bronx is a bit of a pain.
Keep in mind that for most games, the face value price for bleacher tickets ranges from between $17 and $22, and grandstand tix go between $21 and $32. Now, I’m not very good at math, but even I can see that those tix are going for over 50% below face value for most games! What’s more is that the Mets tickets are actually costing more on the secondary market for most games than the Yankees are. It wasn’t that long ago that Squawker Jon and I went to Citi Field for Mets games and paid 97 cents per ticket!
The Yankees are doing a lot of ticket deals now to get people in the door. (As previously noted, Jon and I got tix for $4.18 each in April.) If you vote in the All-Star Game, you can get Yankee tickets for 50% off. (Again, a better deal than what the Mets are offering.) And there are a slew of deals at discount sites like Goldstar and the like. I’ve even seen ticket deals in a theater mailing list I belong to!
In addition, the Yankees also now have a Prix Fixe Ticket Offer with NYY Steak. For $99, you can get a three-course meal at NYY Steak, and a main level ticket. Pretty good deal. I suggested Squawker Jon and I go there for his birthday next month. For some weird reason, he declined! (Jon did joke about how Yankee fans who have never gotten to dine in a fancy restaurant like NYY Steak will act. What would Lonn Trost say?)
Given how the Mets are the team on the rise in this town, it was a particularly bad idea to inconvenience fans with that mobile ticket debacle, especially given that the Yanks haven’t been very interesting to watch this year. Billy Witz of the New York Times recently did a followup on that story, saying that snafus with mobile tickets have meant long lines at the customer service booths. He wrote that this is due to multiple issues:
The problems fans have experienced are myriad. Among them: not being able to open mobile tickets, experiencing glitches while trying to transfer tickets to friends, and having bar codes register as invalid. Some foreign phones do not accept mobile ticketing, and other obstacles include remembering the password for the ticketing account and downloading the right app to begin with.
Some fans, acknowledging that they are not tech savvy, wonder why the Yankees did not consider this and give them the option of print-at-home tickets — at least until bugs in the mobile-ticketing system were ironed out.
Witz wrote that Yankee ticket sales are down 2,000 a game this year and 20 percent since 2010, which is not surprising to me. But that’s only half the story. The other half of the story is how many tickets that are sold are being heavily discounted.
The irony is that Randy Levine and Lonn Trost picked this dumb fight with StubHub in part because Trost said season ticket holders were unhappy because they were paying full price while people sitting near them were getting discounted tickets. Yet the team is now…wait for it…discounting tickets even more to get fans in the door! How do these clowns still have jobs?
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
