I’m glad I didn’t stay up after the rain delay started last night to watch the end of the Yankee game, or I would be fit to be tied. Imagine staying up until 2:15 a.m. to see the Yankees lose! I’m also still pretty irate over StubHub making this terrible deal with the Yankees.
Too much of the NYC sports media is missing the boat on what this actually means for fans. In fact, a business (not sports) reporter Daniel Roberts of Yahoo! Finance has the best piece I’ve seen out the implications. I found out from him that StubHub already has a minimum amount it will sell tickets for, in order to cover their expenses: $6. But that minimum is going to go by the wayside now with this new deal.
Neil Best of Newsday reports that Scott Cutler, head of StubHub, says that only about 100 tickets of the 51,000 Yankee tix currently on sale with them will be affected by the new policy of a price floor of 50% of the full season-ticket price for the seat’s section. Yankee president — and known liar — Randy Levine claimed it was an “infinitesimal” amount. Both claims are sheer nonsense.
Look at the chart below (and these are for non-Legends seats). Under the new policy, I crunched the numbers to show what are the minimum amounts those tickets can go for:
I then went to StubHub to see how many tickets currently on sale are below these ticket floors. And I call shenanigans on Cutler’s numbers of only 100 tickets of the 51,000 on sale being affected. Because I counted over 500 grandstand and bleacher tickets at $6, the lowest price currently allowed for tickets and one of the prices below the new ticket floor, JUST FOR TUESDAY’S GAME, let alone the whole season. And that doesn’t include all of the many other tickets selling for tonight and other games that are currently below the price floor minimum.
I also noted entire rows for sale, which may indicate not a ticket broker or fan putting those tickets on sale, but the Yankees themselves.
You can go to StubHub and see for yourself — click here to see Yankees tickets and compare with the numbers I listed above.
Did you know that the Yankees are averaging 38,313 people per game this year, while the Mets are closing the attendance gap with them by averaging 35,254 a game? And given that the Mets have a smaller ballpark, they now have a higher percentage of fans coming through the door.
So you would think that the Yankees should be trying to get *more* people through the door by lowering ticket prices, and forgetting about having a ticket floor on resale prices. Instead, they have just made it more expensive for their fans.
This is Exhibit A of how out of touch and incompetent the Yankees’ front office is. Randy Levine has made tickets more expensive for fans at the very same time they are having a hard time getting people in the ballpark And Hal (The Dilettante) Steinbrenner can’t be bothered to, you know, actually hire competent people and fire clowns like Levine. You know, like a real boss would. I guess it would interrupt Hal’s time tooling around in his private plane.
Levine also ticked off the media yesterday when they asked him whether the team would be sellers at the trade deadline, as the New York Daily News notes:
“You (reporters) obviously have nothing more important to write about than to write nonsense about that,” Levine said at the press conference to announce the new deal between the Yankees and StubHub. “When we decide to become sellers, if we decide to become sellers, or if we decide to become buyers, you’ll know about it. I guess the difference is most of you guys have never run anything. We have a lot of history here of knowing what we’re doing and a lot of confidence in our baseball operations people, so we’ll see what happens.”
