This was a waste of time to read.

thanks!

I strongly suspect that, so long as tickets are scarce, people will figure out ways to scalp those tickets.

Short of selling your phone, or loaning your phone to another, the mobile phone electronic ticket ties the purchaser directly to the use of that electronic ticket

Well, sure if you've just got a couple extra Rays-Rangers tickets to dump for face value, you're not going to give anyone your personal phone. But if it's a ticket worth thousands, and disposable phones cost ten or twenty bucks, there will be a secondary market in phones as tickets.

The only way to eliminate scalping is to check, as airlines do, the identity of the user of the ticket. And unfortunately that approach also prevents giving your friends your season tickets to a particular game, a nice perk of season-tickethood. Customers -- particularly corporate customers -- aren't going to like that. So I have no doubt that the phone-ticket will remain just another convenient delivery device, not an anti-scalping measure.

Believe it or not, there are still plenty of people who don't have cell phones. There will still be plenty of paper tickets to scalp.

Yeah, making tickets non-transferrable (I didn't RTFA article, so I don't know that they're even trying to do that) with mobile phone tickets and the like is kissing corporate season ticket holders goodbye. That's the whole reason they buy em, to give out to clients and such.

I don't get why teams don't just sell the tickets for what they're worth in the first place instead of scalping them a la the Trib's Wrigley Field Premium Ticket Services.

I don't get why teams don't just sell the tickets for what they're worth in the first place instead of scalping them a la the Trib's Wrigley Field Premium Ticket Services.

To hide the money from MLB revenue sharing?

Hang on... Making tickets electronic is supposed to make them more difficult to transfer? Just how hard do they think forwarding a text message is?

To hide the money from MLB revenue sharing?

Does that work? Because if so, all any team needs to do is sell all their tix for 1¢ to a phony-baloney holding company. Seems pretty blatant even for the Lords.

Does that work? Because if so, all any team needs to do is sell all their tix for 1¢ to a phony-baloney holding company. Seems pretty blatant even for the Lords.

Worked for the Cubs.

I don't get why teams don't just sell the tickets for what they're worth in the first place instead of scalping them a la the Trib's Wrigley Field Premium Ticket Services.

There is more negative PR backlash if they just raised the actual face value. With WFPTS, they can have their cake and eat it, too.

To hide the money from MLB revenue sharing?

Has there been a crackdown on this yet, like the undersold broadcast rights fees to TBS, WGN, YES, etc.? It seems like it would be pretty easy to police.

Has there been a crackdown on this yet, like the undersold broadcast rights fees to TBS, WGN, YES, etc.? It seems like it would be pretty easy to police.

It would be, if the owners had any interest at all in doing it.

Has there been a crackdown on this yet, like the undersold broadcast rights fees to TBS, WGN, YES, etc.? It seems like it would be pretty easy to police.

It would be, if the owners had any interest at all in doing it.

Why wouldn't the small market/low revenue owners have an interest in doing it?

Why wouldn't the small market/low revenue owners have an interest in doing it?

Because if they pushed the big-market owners too hard on this, the big-market owners might start wanting more accountability as to where the revenue-sharing dollars are going.

Do the big-market owners really want more accountability as to where the revenue-sharing dollars are going?

Worked for the Cubs.

And they got absolutely hammered on it, although they have weathered it. Plus it bet it wasn't for 1¢.

Do the big-market owners really want more accountability as to where the revenue-sharing dollars are going?

Maybe not, but they can raise a stink about it. George Steinbrenner's always grousing about subsidizing small-market teams. Take away his ability to play shell games with his money, and he can raise a very big stink.