User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
Buy MLB playoff tickets, plus 2011 World Series, 2011 ALCS tickets and NLCS game tickets. We also have Texas Rangers playoff schedule, tickets to Red Sox games and Yankees game tickets. Plus, buy Phillies baseball tickets, Tigers playoff tickets and the biggies like ALDS baseball tickets and 2011 NLDS tickets. |
Demarini, Easton and TPX Baseball Bats
|
AllianceTickets.com has cheap MLB Tickets. Get all your Colorado Rockies Tickets, Seattle Mariners Tickets, San Francisco Giants Tickets and all your favorite baseball tickets here. We also carry cheap Denver Broncos Tickets, Seattle Seahawks Tickets and Denver Nuggets Tickets. |
Page rendered in 2.3360 seconds
40 querie(s) executed
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
One guy was saying, I think, that his old tickets cost 125 dollars and now they are asking 500 bucks a ticket and you can't get partial season tickets you have to buy all 81 games. So to get two tickets to the game cost 81,000 a year. On the plus side I believe that all parking and food+bev were comped.
Now, I'm sure the teams will get it so I guess from their perspective it isn't insane but for your common fan and even your uncommon fan those prices seem insane.
Another guy was saying that the Giants were charging him $20,000 a seat just for the right to purchase the ticket.
Of course that was then, and this is now. The beginning of the end began sometime in the 80's, and what ended it was increased demand, a willingness to push the envelope on the part of the owners, and a deliberate shrinking of the supply, as seen in these smaller seating capacities.
But this didn't exactly begin yesterday, and complaining about ticket prices at this point is like a lobster complaining about boiling water just before he's being served for dinner. Just be glad for Extra Innings and let the millionaires and the suckers fight the traffic for the privilege of being thrown into the pot.
My friend went to Xavier in the late 80's early 90's and he went to the Cincinnati World Series in 1990 dirt cheap. Just went to the stadium and bought a ticket from a scalper. It was some insanely low amount as compared to nowadays prices. I can't imagine trying to do that nowadays. From what I remember they didn't even let you down by the park without a ticket during the Chicago world series.
Look around and you will see certain markets taking the same approach. The typical pattern is a mature market with a high cost of market entry. Like oil refining. Or papermaking. Or fertilizer processing.
And baseball stadiums.
Somebody did the math and determined that if you eliminated capacity you could really put the squeeze on the users.
And it's working......
I think that's BS. They've expanded the league, and increased the schedule, which is a huge increase in supply. And in other stadia, they are scampering to find any possible way to add a couple of seats (e.g. Fenway).
I could have added free agency to my list, but I didn't want to ignite another flame war on that subject. And anyway, free agency was but one factor among several in bringing about what we have today. To avoid it you would have needed what would have amounted to some sort of a Grand Bargain among owners and players to keep salaries and ticket prices at below market levels, but that sort of agreement never would have lasted for 15 minutes. What we have now amounts to a sick joke on what is quaintly referred to as the "average fan," but given all the factors in play, I can't see how it could have been avoided.
I see the analogy though, and I agree it applies here as well
I stopped paying for tickets to go to Yankee stadium sometime around 2001, and to Shea about 2003. Now I go there if I have free tickets from friends and free time. And I'm just fine with it
I think that's BS. They've expanded the league, and increased the schedule, which is a huge increase in supply. And in other stadia, they are scampering to find any possible way to add a couple of seats (e.g. Fenway).
What a completely clueless comment. Look at Camden Yards compared to Memorial Stadium. Look at Comerica compared to Tiger Stadium. Look at the two new New York stadiums compared to their predecessors. And so on. The Red Sox waited until they knew they were likely to sell out every game before they began adding seats. Overall league capacity (i.e. expansion) has nothing to do with it, and the schedule was expanded to 162 games nearly a half century ago.
It's the "personal seat license" and it's money for nothing for NFL owners.
My guess is it was a move designed to match demand and keep the cost of the new stadium down.
I believe they started planning Citi Field before the 2007 season (not inclined to look it up), but I'll add those figures in any case.
Average attendance Shea:
2003: 26,427
2004: 28,621
2005: 34,348
2006; 41,265
2007: 47,580
What exactly is the use of having a stadium the size of Shea, when on average 20000+ seats are going to be empty. There's a slight benefit for peak games certainly, but I doubt that's enough to offset the costs involved.
The whole concept of deliberately shrinking supply to put on the squeeze is cute, until you realize that it really doesn't apply to baseball, because they have a complete monopoly on the product. They set the prices, and people either fork over the dough, or stay home, there is no need to look for cute mechanisms to achieve this.
Whens the last time you saw them drop the prices at PNC to 1$ a ticket, because they have a large supply and no demand? It doesn't happen...
If tickets become too expensive, wouldn't you expect the owners of them to stop giving them away? Subsidization is fine as long as the cost of doing so is inconsequential.
The only thing I can think of is eliminating the tax deduction for the businesses that buy many of the best seats. At the margins, the subsidy would eat into the prices the teams could charge.
If someone's really willing to spend $135 of their own money for a mediocre seat at New Yankee Stadium -- an absolutely preposterous amount for a single, regular-season baseball game -- there's not a lot of bile you can aim at the teams for charging it. The only addendum I'd add is that they aren't spending it for only a baseball game anymore; they're also spending it for admission to the mall/Disneyland of food courts, cigar bars, and sporting goods shops that are everywhere in the modern stadium. It's salt to the wound when you realize that the cities were blackmailed into subsidizing not only the sports facility, but also very profitable retail complexes for these teams.
On the other hand, if people want to see a few games a year, and they know that Shea only has a few thousand empty seats on any given day, they will buy them in advance. And maybe not go on that rainy day, with Pittsburgh playing, but the Mets don't really care, because they have the money.
I am really surprised you term the reduction of capacity "cute" since it is directly responsible for increasing costs across the board in daily living.
And it most certainly DOES apply to baseball since it IS the same approach.
Every new stadium has fewer, sometimes many fewer, seats available than its predecessor. And that wasn't about maintenance cost control of the stadium.
The econ/finance folks figured out that the PERCEPTION of limited supply could increase the value of a ticket MANY TIMES greater than making a few more tickets available. Better to sell a seat for $100 than 2 for $90. Because even with that extra person the "math" shows that the person shelling out the $100 is MUCH MORE likely to spend at the ballpark. A LOT more.
This is documented stuff.
I really don't think the extra cost involved in maintaining more seats is more than a rounding error in the finances of something like the Mets. Likewise, I don't think that the "cost of the new stadium" (which new stadium?) is all that affected by the difference between a 35,000 capacity and a 55,000 capacity.
The whole concept of deliberately shrinking supply to put on the squeeze is cute, until you realize that it really doesn't apply to baseball, because they have a complete monopoly on the product.
This makes no sense. It only applies to situations in which someone has a monopoly on the product. Otherwise if Boston-Area Business A reduced supply to make each of its widgets more valuable, it wouldn't work because Boston-Area Business B would just increase supply to take advantage of it. You need a monopoly or a cartel in order to artificially limit supply.
These companies make BILLIONS. Do they act in concert? Cannot be proven. But when the price moves by one they all move. And who is going to spend a Billion dollars to get in a business where customers are already in contracts that last 3-10 years?
“It’s going to cost $2,600 to sit there on a rainy day in April to watch Kansas City,” he said. “You sit there saying, maybe at $220, you have a chance of selling them to somebody, but try selling four tickets at $650 each.”
You better have health insurance, Richie. I'd hate to hear that we're subsidizing your emergency room trips while you're unloading 2.6K for KC in April.
Wow!
In the NFL, stadia are getting bigger where possible (see new stadium in Dallas).
In europe, football teams accross the board are increasing capicity, or building new ones.
If this really were such a great ploy, MLB execs would as usual be playing catchup with all the other sports industries.
Even at Pirates games I wonder how much scalpers make. Maybe they survive by buying tickets at 1/3 the face value from desperate people who no longer need them.
You've got to remember that baseball has an exemption from the US Antitrust laws. If baseball had to play by the same rules as other industries (and to be sure, there are good arguments in favor of the exemptions) we'd have about 8 or 10 teams in the NY Metro area.
From a purely economic perspective, we're probably beyond the point where the antitrust exemption is producing the effects it is supposed too.
Football teams need to sell out 8 games a year. Even with the biggest stadiums, that totals maybe 800K people. The NFL also has the built in black-out rules, which also offer leverage for the teams in ensuring that fans attend games.
Baseball's overall revenue is expected to pass that of the NFL within the next year or two, and has been growing at a much greater rate for years. MLB must be doing something right.
Because the games are seven to ten times more frequent than soccer or football games, so actual scarcity of tickets, with 81 home games, could only occur if the team was the most popular thing in existence. Whereas if an NFL team doesn't sell out its games, even after sucking for a decade, it's a news story, since they only have to fill the stadium once a week for eight weeks a year instead of 6 days a week for half the summer.
Why do you think MLB is the only major sports industry to do this? Is it really because stadiums with smaller capacity are cheaper and easy to maintain? That would apply to the other sports too, if true.
There were scalpers at Expos games even in their final season. They were basically selling everything for $5 CDN ($3.20 US at the time). I have no idea how these guys were making any money at all.
Most teams in the NFL sell out their 10 games already and have a long waiting list for season tickets. They have excess demand for the supply sitting there untapped. It's very different than MLB, in most cities. Don't know squat about that other football, other than years ago a friend attended a Chelsea game and said they were in the standing section and it was packed (as well as crazed).
EDIT: It looks like I owe the world a coke.
I wouldn't want to watch a baseball game that way, though.
I find that if I'm in the nosebleeds in football or hockey, I watch the patterns, whether it's the downfield blocking or the skaters filling the lanes. The Jumbotron shows the replays, so I can see the good cutback or the good glove save on the replay.
With baseball, if I can't follow the ball, I don't enjoy the game. Watching the cutoff man get into position just doesn't give me enough of a thrill. :)
I think you have that exactly backwards. Having watched both sports from nosebleed seats on more than one occasion, I'd say baseball is significantly easier to follow. It's mostly due to the greater number and density of the players in football, as well as the fact that the action in football depends on quick shifts in direction and intentional misdirection by the offense.
Here's what they're doing "right": They can sit in a room together and fix prices and divide territories. If competitors in any other industry were caught having even one telephone conversation attempting to do this, they'd go to jail.
a team like Notre Dame will always sell out no matter how big the stadium is because of the draw, and with just a few home games each year they need as many seats as possible to make as much as they can
and with baseball they have 81 home dates to fill and you wont always have that happen just because of the sheer number of games, but for the big market teams that have large fan bases and usually sell out or come close, it makes sense to reduce the capacity of some of the stadiums in order to increase demand which gives way to higher ticket prices because they have become more scarce.
go look up some basic econ and it will makes sense, they can charge as much as the market allows for those tickets, and well baseball figured out they can get the market to sustain the higher prices with reduced capacity. and maybe in the future those teams will slowly add seats to the stadiums once they are sure they can keep the prices at least at the level they were at before expanson. in other words its all about perception and money.
Even at Pirates games I wonder how much scalpers make. Maybe they survive by buying tickets at 1/3 the face value from desperate people who no longer need them."
If a scalper has season tickets, then he can make back his money on the games that are actually in demand, and use the rest as loss leaders. If he's already in the black from the Yankees-Pirates tickets, he doesn't need to get full face (or even anything close to it) for Nats-Pirates.
I usually end up near the top row but behind the plate. I like those seats, from a cost/viewing perspective. If I sit too many rows up in the OF seats or down the line, I can't follow the ball well enough. Maybe it's a wearing glasses thing?
Baseball's nosebleeds are much closer to the field than football's. The question is, which sport is easier to follow from FOOTBALL'S nosebleeds?
These companies make BILLIONS. Do they act in concert?
Well, if they are acting in concert and are price fixing, then why limit the supply. I know phone companys do this, and they don't evan have a supply as such that they can limit. As long as everyone sets their prices the same, people either pay or go without...
Because the games are seven to ten times more frequent than soccer or football games...
For the NFL this is true, for european football not so much. Take a top Premiership team:
19 league home games
~ 3 FA cup home games
~ 3 league cup home games
~ 4 Champions league games
If they make a cup run in one or two competuitions they can easily get 30-35 home games a year...
And except for top matches, you can still get walk ups.
Why do you think MLB is the only major sports industry to do this?
I think they are doing this because their isn't enough demand, at leat not at the prices that is most profitable to the franchise. They are better off selling 30-40k tickets at 200$+, than 55k at 40$. And if they built a stadium the size of Shea, and were only drawing 30-40k a game, I'd be the first to rip them for building a stadium beyond their needs.
Actually Camden Yards predated the Jake, but the first team to realize the value of limited supply was the Red Sox, and in the beginning it was a matter of pure luck, not design. After Yawkey had tried to replace Fenway in the 60's but been rebuffed time and again by the city, the Sox then hit upon the good times of the post-1967 era, when demand doubled almost overnight.
At that point the Red Sox began heavy marketing of pre-season advance sales, not just for season tickets (which weren't that big a factor back then) but for desirable individual games. The pitch was always "get em now while you still can---don't be left out," almost identical to the NFL's strategy. There had always been pre-season sales, but this was the first time that the threat of being shut out for individual games was real rather than hypothetical.
And it worked beautifully, although if the Sox dropped out of contention in Septmember a lot of those tickets weren't used. But from the team's POV that was a lot better than not selling the tickets in the first place.
After Yawkey died, the Sox then hit on their next idea, namely adding a dollar to bleacher tickets on game day sales, effectively getting a premium from fans who had been willing to wait on the weather or the desirability of the matchup. This was met with a lot of complaining, but that quickly faded.
And from there, the concept of "premium" games and micro-tuned price differentials (previously there had been as few as 4 to 6 types of seats for an entire park, whereas now there often are several dozen) became little more than seeing what you could get away with, since the precedent had now been set. The auction mentality is now firmly in place, as you can see by the comments of the football Giants' owner about being able to "charge anything and still sell out the stadium."
Every single one of these changes has had one common factor: The favoring of the affluent or corporate fan over the traditional fan base. For those willing to pay, there was a huge increase in convenience, comfort and amenities. For those who can't afford it, there's always the (very) limited number of nosebleed seats, TV, or the option of moving to Pittsburgh or Miami.
And even if we're discussing 35 home games a year, that's still not even 45% of what MLB teams have as home dates, without getting into the playoffs which is basically what counting later Cup rounds is equal to.
You've obviously never watched Man Unt - Reading on a Wednesday evening...
I should make sure the Pitt games I go to this year aren't nationally televised. Hey, they're playing Bowling Green this week. perfect!
But that only proves my point. They played a FA Cup 5th Round game at Old Trafford (EDIT:) two Cups ago, Feb of '07 and drew 70K (more than 90% of capacity). That's not an espcially compelling match-up as these things go, but because it's Manchester United and it's the FA Cup, it still merits Top Match status. You can't compare it to Wednesday game between the Mets and Nationals in August for attendance purposes.
Please explain how the structure of European soccer is similar to that of MLB.
Perhaps you might start with how the barriers to entry, and competition, in European soccer are similar to MLB? Or you might want to talk about the exemptions from the law that the European soccer leagues have?
I realize that for lots of people here, 1992 is literally a lifetime ago, and ancient history to them. But for some of us it's just a moment ago.
And I still have a stub from the last Redskins game I attended that year. 46 yard line, about the tenth row of the upper deck, fabulous seat. I bought it outside the stadium half an hour before kickoff from one of the scores of fans who had to sell an extra seat at the last minute. I paid the face value of thirty bucks.
That $30.00 ticket was the equivalent of $45.67 today. And this was the year after the Skins had won the Super Bowl, when the waiting list for season tickets was as big as it's ever been. Just the memory of that game (and many more like it) is more than enough to prevent me from ever being hijacked by Dan Snyder and his perennial team of losers today. Redskins fans have to be the biggest suckers in the history of professional sports.
Isn't most of MLB's "lost capacity" due to the elimination of dual-use stadiums? The value of the better seats increase in baseball-only stadiums because fans are closer to the field and have better lines of sights. You can fit more people in a football stadium but some of those seats are a tough sell in a baseball configuration.
And you could take the metro to the stadium ....
My formative baseball years were spent at Tiger Stadium in the late 1970s. Four seating levels: box, reserved, general admission, bleachers. When I was really young, they were $4, $3, $2, $1. They renovated the place with city-issued bonds in the late 70s and a surcharge was added to the tickets and a box seat probably got up to around $6 by 1980. Figure the CPI has roughly quadrupled since then, so the seat would be $24 today if tickets didn't outpace inflation. All the box seats in the joint were in front of the poles and since the poles made the seats a lot better, there were probably 10,000 seats there that give you better sight lines than all but the best 1,000-2,000 at Comerica.
I don't really have a problem with where ticket prices have gone; we're all free to decide how much we want to spend on things that are offered to us. Seems to me, though, you really don't get out enough if you'd rather spend $250 for Yankees/KC in April than on other things you can get for $250.
This is great point, but I still buy into the concept of decreased capacity to increase scarcity which increases demand, particularly the 'pre-sale' approach.
While County Stadium was dual use until 1995, it was the last stadium replaced which was not built for 'dual use' purposes since old Arlington (unless I'm ignorant about the genesis of Arlington). There's been a lot of new ballparks since The Ballpark opened. Either way, nobody is building ballparks for baseball with capacity exceeding 50,000.
Sucker. That same year (or maybe it was 1991), I saw Michael Jordan, in a playoff game, for $12 at the Spectrum.
I agree.
I think the real baseball trend is to have "better" seats. Better viewing angel, wider seats (Americans ain't gettin thinner), more leg room.
The 40,000 is probably the limit of good seats you can get. The incentive to buy early is a happy side effect.
After all, the Yankees are ALREADY selling out almost every game, so, if they could have 55,000 equivalent seats in the new Stadium (rather than 50,000) why wouldn't they?
Bullets/Bulls Game 3 1997 Playoffs, Capital Centre $38. Corner of arena about halfway up. Split season tickets with friends in first level between top of the key and half court (they won the lottery for that playoff game); face value was around $30. The team moved to the MCI Center the next year and the seats became $75. They're probably $100+ now. There's no way the relative quality of the products supports that kind of increase.
Sucker. That same year (or maybe it was 1991), I saw Michael Jordan, in a playoff game, for $12 at the Spectrum.
That's ain't nothin'. Back in the old days, I got a front-row seat at the Olympic World Super Series Championship Finals for only exty cents in Confederate money, which was minus 200 dollars American ($4.6 billion today). And I saw Bigfamous Superstar score the game winner! And he winked at me! Then I found a Picasso someone dropped in the parking lot!
Now, of course, everything sucks. You kids, you missed it.
Now, of course, everything sucks. You kids, you missed it.
Hey, if you're stupid enough to pay full value for something I got a steal on for years, have at it.
But the point isn't the structure of the two seasons. The point is that somebody made the claim that MLB teams have 7-10 times the amoutnt of home games that suropean football teams do. And this is flat out wrong.
I still don't think the argument of "creating scarcity" holds up. For it to evan have a shot at working, teams actually have to sell out the majority of the games. When you can walk up to 90% of the games and not have to worry about not getting a ticket, there is no scarcity for the customer to worry about.
Most of them haven't come close to doing so, at least until recent years.
Here a couple:
US Cellular. Capacity: 40,615
2007 33,141
2006 36,511
2005 28,924
2004 23,834
2003 23,945
Comerica Park. Capacity: 40,120
2007 37,619
2006 32,049
2005 24,994
2004 23,667
2003 16,892
Progressive Field. Capacity: 43,405
2007 28,098
2006 24,668
2005 24,360
2004 22,400
2003 21,358
Camden Yards. Capacity: 48,190
2007 26,726
2006 26,582
2005 32,404
2004 33,876
2003 30,302
If any of these were actually built to create a perception of scarcity, they have failed miserably. Or, more likely, the owners had a gairly good idea of the probable demand, and chose the size of the new stadium accordingly.
Sometimes there is no conspiracy.
Arlington Stadium used to be the home field of UT-Arlington football in the 1970s. Clem's Baseball Blog has a very interesting Arlington Stadium page that talks about the design of the park (it was called Turnpike Stadium at first, of course) as a dual-use baseball/football park. Clem's says that high-school football was played there, and that sounds right, as big HS games continue to be huge draws in this part of the world.
2007 28,098
2006 24,668
2005 24,360
2004 22,400
2003 21,358
2000: 42,670
1999: 42,820
1998: 42,806
1997: 42,295
1996: 41,220
They sold every single ticket before the season even started in 1996, 1997 and 1998. (About 100 seats were added between 1996 and 1997.) The Indians sold out 455 straight home games from 1995 to 2001.
That wouldn't have happened in Cleveland Stadium.
Yes, but you don't plan the size of a stadium for the first three years, or for the time when your team happens to be at it's peak. The novelty of a new stadium eventually runs out, as does an era of a teams dominance, unless you're the Yankees... oh wait.
When the Indians planned their stadium, I'm fairly sure they didn't expect to be winning 6 of 7 division titles. If they had knowen this, they may well have decided to an extra couple of thousand seats, but that's life.
Overall I would say all of those teams I listed (including the Indians) made a pretty decent estimation of their market. Selling about 66% of their tickets in a normal year, with spare capacity when they happen to have a sucessful year.
Thanks, I suspected UT-A played football there but was too lazy to look it up.
In some ways Arlington or Turnpike, was treated like Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, where it kept being expanded in an awkward fashion, with high school football games being played at both. My father played HS games at Rosenblatt, and the Univ. of Nebraska-Omaha, f/k/a Omaha U. also played games there, though none after 1975.
So I'd expect them not to sell most of the tickets that are that expensive, but apparently I'd be wrong. Of course, I also can't get my mind around how many people apparently have so much money that for them $250 is psychologically, let alone practically, the same as $10 is for me.
To build attractable luxury box seats you have to sacrifice other seats and closeness for other seats. Baseball teams have a pretty clear history of almost nobody wanting the nosebleed seats in pretty much all parks. The demand has to be really great to sell those seats out. Even teams like the Red Sox and Cubs didn't start to sell these seats out until recently. If the Cubs had 50,000 seats they could sell them and charge a ton. If the Yanks built a new park with 55,000 seats they could sell them and charge a ton. Nobody in baseball needs to create scarcity to jack up prices. Building new parks and building better teams will create its own scarcity. Being bad creates huge amounts of supply that no matter how small you build it cannot erase.
But I'd argue you're missing the point. Teams are aware they have a floor of X people (or, I suppose X thousand people) who will show up to a game. The scarcity issue comes into play when the team is good (or right after) and people want to see them. That's when if the Indians were playing in Cleveland Stadium they (probably) would've drawn more people in raw numbers during those years, but those people could've walked up. Instead, the Indians built a season ticket base, which has a number of benefits.
This isn't some sort of bizarre "conspiracy" as you seem to be trying to portray, from an economic standpoint, it's just logical. Now perhaps some teams--because of ineptitude on either the baseball or business, or both--ends have missed the mark by denying it is happening is like claiming ticket prices haven't gone up.
The luxury boxes themselves must crowd out at least a couple thousand seats; that factor alone goes a long way toward the capacity reductions we're seeing.
It was part of the Miller Park studies and for just about every other modern stadium.
I am trying to find some of the prospectus information but this dates back years so am having no luck.
So if folks wish to brand me "liar" so be it. But I know what I know and as they say in the country "dem's the facts".
1. making the seats more comfortable and with better views (raising the amount someone would be willing to pay for a seat)
2. increasing the number of premium-seating opportunities (most notably, luxury suites)
3. other profitable stuff (concessions, shops, activities)
4. reducing the number of seats (raising prices through restriction of supply)
These are not mutually exclusive; any one of 1, 2, and 3 will also produce 4. But the point is that it's not as simple as "reduce seats, gain profit!" Obviously if they reduce capacity to 1 seat, they'll lose on concessions, etc., and not be able to drive the ticket price up to cover it. But the recent actions on 1 through 4 have no doubt moved teams toward a more optimal use of space. Whether the reduced capacity is being done to drive ticket prices up, or is the result of other efforts to increase profits that just happens to create scarcity, I don't know.
EDITed to make more visually appealing.
Actually box seats in Tiger Stadium were $6.50 in 1980. But the CPI has only gone up just over two and a half times, and that $6.50 box seat in 1980 would be $16.85 today, not $24.00.
OTOH I hear that the urinals at Comerica are world class, so you win some and you lose some.
80. PreservedFish Posted: August 26, 2008 at 04:03 PM (#2916713)
The Oakland A's closed off the Upper Deck a few years ago by covering the whole section, many thousands of seats, with a big old green tarp. My understanding at the time was that they did it for the exact reasons discussed - to increase scarcity. And also to make it feel cozier.
But why would it create scarcity in any real tangible sense? Yes it decreases ticket supply but those tickets were not being sold anyway. Nor were thousands and thousands of other tickets each game. The Vet used to close off entire sections of the stadium for almost all non 4th of July/NY games, nobody thought, "oh wow tickets are scarce now, I better buy some".
I hear what you are saying VI but how many teams that raised prices did so because they were moving into new parks? If New Comiskey was a 52,000 seater the price of tickets would have still gone up. The Sox have never come close to selling out and the demand for those below average tickets is never really going to be there.
Almost all new stadiums were built to maximize the amount of "good" seats. Whether that be luxury box or "200" level (or whatever they are called in your local stadium)seats. All other seats were at the very least secondary, and because the emphasis was on these seats you can't put as many "other" seats in the park. But again they never wanted those "other" seats anyway, they never have.
OTOH I hear that the urinals at Comerica are world class, so you win some and you lose some.
Good facts, good humor, great post.
So fans (suckers) in 2008 are subject to a reverse Moore's Law: computer buyers get more and more horsepower for less and less money, baseball fans get the exact same product for more and more money. In the case of the Tigers particularly, there is zero/zilch/nada doubt that the 1980 version was a better product than the 2008 version (other than the rock music soundtrack at the yard now, which I prefer), but the real cost has at least tripled.
Even that metric understates the true cost because it ignores the fact that practically every game now is shown on television in glorious HD, reducing the marginal benefit gained by paying for a live ticket.
(I'll be sure to test out the "urinal" theory this weekend when I visit CoPa for the first time. My little man tells me it probably won't justify the higher costs, but I'll keep an open mind.)
This creature exists?
Baseball is a service industry. Cost of service has gone up in all service industries. In virtually all service industries you are paying more for the same amount of services, sometimes even less.
There are also different desirabilities of tickets; the fact that I can walk up to the gate when the Royals or Pirates are in town and get tickets doesn't help me if I'd rather see the Yankees and Red Sox. The fact that I can walk up to the gate on a Tuesday in May doesn't help if I want to see a Saturday game in July.
Of course. That's built into the inflation adjusted price of $16.85 for a box seat, as opposed to the $6.50 it cost 28 years ago.
That is because there wasn't much demand for those seats -- the NLCS didn't even sell out in Pittsburgh. That isn't a knock on Cincy or Pittsburgh; things were different them. Some where in the last fifteen years, the demand curve changed also. Yes, the supply has been reduced, which certainly has affected the prices, but there is more going on than just a reduction of supply.
All more than offset by: (1) the more appealing 1980 team; and (2) the undeniably better sightlines in a Tiger Stadium box seat, especially in the upper deck where you were practically on top of the infield.(**)
I'd concede the improvements you mention. There's no way they're worth a tripling of the real cost (other than in the tautological sense that a thing's worth what someone's willing to pay for it.)
Seeing that a 1980 box seat cost only $16.85 in 2008 dollars gives me the warm and fuzzy feeling of getting a great product for much less than it was really worth -- many times over. I half-expect to get a bill in the mail from Bud asking for reparations.
(**) And I wouldn't concede that the seats are more comfortable.
Demand was what drove that. The Indians weren't initially selling out every game -- the sell out streak didn't start until 1995, plus seats were initally very cheap at Jacobs' Field and remained relatively cheap for a long time. The Indians were finally winning, so people wanted to see that, plus the Browns were gone for three of those years.
That smaller stadium isn't helping the Indians now demand has plummetted.
This is a problem primarily because there are many groups of consumers who want different kinds of top-league baseball. There are those of us who just want the top-league baseball, but don't care very much, if at all, what kind of shape the stadium is in, what kind of food is for sale there, how big the seats are, etc., and then there are the people who are concerned about those things in addition to wanting the top-league baseball. Those things do cost more, understandably, and it's also understandable why they'd be "worth" a premium, save for the small matter of their being irrelevant to the actual product, which is baseball.
In a perfect world, there would be Memorial Stadium circa 1971 for people like me, DMN, and Andy, and there would be Flavor-of-the-Month Field for the "casual/corporate fan." But that's impossible, so it's too bad that the top league, the one and only one that there can be, caters to the casual/corporate fan instead of what might be called the "art" fan. It's easy to see why they do, just hard to see why there are enough of that kind of fan who shell out that kind of money; after all, if one wants to sit in a comfortable seat, eat gourmet food, listen to rock music, and have a baseball game going on some hundreds of feet away, he can do it at home or at a bar..
I don't really see why corporations gobble up tickets to sporting events at those kinds of prices, either.
Fair point, although the Baumol Effect is built into the CPI to a degree, since services are part of it. How much more expensive would the ticket have to be to keep baseball returns in line with non-service productivity gains?
They would have sold a great deal more tickets over those years in a new stadium with the capacity of the old sh!thole, even with many fewer sellouts. However, the Indians didn't build Jacobs' Field to intentionally limit seating in order to drive up prices. That realization came later.
Nor did they expect the Browns to leave town.
Two simple answers to that: Bragging rights and tax writeoffs, which makes the effective ticket prices for businesses a lot lower than the nominal face value. The best thing that could happen to professional sports from a fan's POV would be the elimination of the business expense deduction for tickets. You'd then begin to see a more honest case of Supply and Demand.
I guess I don't understand the bundling either, which is to say I understand it from the seller's perspective but not the consumer's. The only economically competitive product being offered at a baseball stadium is ... baseball. The beer is no better than at a good pub and costs way more; the food is laughably uncompetitive with what you can get outside the stadium, the sporting goods you can get are laughably uncompetitive, etc. I get the idea that a beer tastes better at the ballpark, but still.
Are people so unable to buy things a la carte that they'll pay that much to have the whole bundle under one umbrella?
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main