Monday, June 17, 2013
Stan “The Fan” Charles: After Biogenesis, Should MLB Players Still Have The Right To Arbitration?
(www.pressboxonline.com)
Dumb Dora/Donald doesn’t pretend to be enough of an ____________ .
Read More...If an already-signed player who hits an average of 20 home runs and 80 RBIs per year makes, say, $5 million per season, then surely a second player who is averaging 24 home runs and 86 RBIs deserves $6 million per year. It made perfect sense in those honest days, before the introduction of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs to the game.
But teams made deals based on the supposed integrity of the accumulated statistics ...
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1 2 >I guess that lowering their prices to meet the real demand would be too radical a concept.
I don't particularly like StubHub nor the general concept of scalping but I can't find a way to argue with Andy's comment. It pisses me off as a season ticket holder that if I try to make a profit on tickets I am putting my tickets at risk but I see the same people selling tickets outside the ballpark at well above face value every night.
EDIT: Obviously not the situation here. But like Andy says, if you are being undersold, lower your prices.
I'd guess that they are selling them below face for all the weeknight games, unless I am under-estimating the number of suckers out there. Because of the combo of the weather and the Celtics game, one could have gone to the Sox game last night for dirt-cheap or free with only the tiniest amount of effort.
That's probably true this year certainly. In years past though it was not.
I mis-clicked on a pair of tickets (bought MONDAY day game tix instead of WEDNESDAY)... within 1 minute I realized my mistake and tried to revert the transaction. StubHub refused, but they said I could re-sell the tickets I just bought (note that SH take 10-15% ON BOTH ENDS of the transaction).
Instead I called my credit card company and told them to deny the charge. Which they did. I presume StubHub ate the tickets, but I suppose they could have just resold them after paying the original seller.
How is that a racket? They aren't doing anything other teams do and in fact those sales are part of the revenue sharing process. Ever since the leagues unified turnstile counts have not been used for anything.
That "attendance" is not actually the number of people at a game is stupid but I wouldn't call it a "racket." That sounds sinister.
And if the original purchaser bought the tickets through a team's website or call center, they also paid a hefty fee to do so.
Not to mention that I don't understand why that would make someone like scalpers more.
I don't particularly like StubHub nor the general concept of scalping but I can't find a way to argue with Andy's comment.
I absolutely hate the whole concept of variable pricing, and the only type of scalping I like is the kind done in person outside the ballpark. I say this even though I fully realize that variable pricing makes perfect economic sense, and I've come to accept it as a given, at least as long as Extra Innings is available as a cheap alternative.
But since the entire rationale for jacking up the "premium" game prices is that "it's nothing but the free market at work", it takes a particular type of chutzpah to whine when that same free market is working exactly as it's supposed to. It's also hard to believe that season ticket holders didn't buy those tickets with their eyes wide open, and that they were unaware of what effects the current recession would have on demand for all but a small number of games.
Of course if the Yankees really wanted to follow the purest form of "supply and demand", they'd eliminate season tickets entirely and put every seat up for auction on the morning of each game, with a limit of four tickets a customer that were individually stamped with the name of the person for whom the ticket was going to be used by. That way the bidding would be restricted to people who actually "demanded" to attend that evening's game, and speculators would have no input. It would be more than a little interesting to see the results from such a format, and I suspect that had such a plan been implemented this season, the total attendance would sink to a level well below 3 million.
And if the original purchaser bought the tickets through a team's website or call center, they also paid a hefty fee to do so.
Question: Is it even possible to buy a ticket these days without paying someone a fee, unless you walk up to the ticket window and buy it in person?
Maybe season tickets?
I haven't bought tickets over the phone in years, but I believe there is a fee involved. For online there definitely is a fee.
If you are doing a person-to-person secondary market transaction (negotiated on the street outside the park or via craigslist etc), there is no real fee.
I dunno, it seems like there's probably 100 models that you could all justify as being "pure supply and demand".
All the upper-deck RF seats in the Ballpark seem to be sold on StubHub, and none of the LF seats are. The distinguishing factor seems to be that LF is the sun field, so none of those seats are much in demand. Or something; who knows? There are opaque arrangements at work.
Meanwhile, I have been to four Ranger games this year and paid about half face value for every ticket, including some great box seats, even though the team is selling out most nights and the park is truly packed (it's not just a paper sellout). I can't complain about StubHub. Nor should the teams: they must have originally gotten face value for a seat I wouldn't have paid that much for, so why do they care if I sit in it? If 40,000 other people don't want to come to the Ballpark, as Yogi Berra would say, there's no way to stop them.
I wonder if some sellers list these insanely high prices in case someone buys them accidentally. Or maybe they do have some pre-determined buyer, and the thing is being used for money laundering or some tax/kickback scam.
Basically I think the Yankees are ticked that the demand for their tickets are so low that it is a cheaper option to buy a ticket that was already sold than to buy an unsold ticket from the Yankees.
When everything is going the Yankees' way they get to sell all of their tickets at the price they want plus they get a fee from Stubhub. Now they get a fee from Stubhub but that fee isn't enough to offset the lost revenue being created from the secondary market.
If there really are no refunds they could be there to trap mis-clickers.
I'm going to have to charge you for having me read that.
True. But often, in the old days, you'd just give those unwanted already-sold tickets away or sell them to your brother-in-law for a promise to mow your lawn or something. At least StubHub collects some money as the transaction passes, even if the nominal resale price is $1. (There's still a minimum $5 fee, even for the 75¢ tickets.) Obviously what the team is really suffering from is that not enough people want to come to the game that they keep their bought seats and force other people to buy unbought ones. But they're trying to blame the messenger/middleman.
I'm going to test my psychic abilities and predict that the 'fan-friendly' alternatives do not include finding a competitor to StubHub that charges smaller service fees to its users.
The food/drinks are way too expensive, yeah. I bring an empty bottle of water and fill it - I don't want crappy beer anyway.
But I made a profit on stubhub, which was nice. They're a bit too greedy, but I find them convenient. I guess I just am not up in arms about all this. (shrug)
I need Richard Dawson's or Charles Nelson Reilly's help on this one.
Craigslist!
Or, maybe I am misunderstanding. The Yankees (and from what I can tell, the rest of MLB) has a contract with StubHub so that they are allowed to "scalp"? And if I, enterprising young webdesigner, want to make a hubostubs.com site and offer the same resale services at 1/2 the service charge, this would be illegal scalping?
And this from teams who essentially force fans to by season tickets to get access to playoff games or premium seats -- then ##### when fans dump the crappy night game tickets they didn't want any way?
On Stubhub, it is individual people re-selling tickets which they have already purchased from the Yankees. Generally speaking, the sellers enter a code from the ticket(s), and the buyer prints out tickets received as PDF's in emails from Stubhub, and these tickets have bar codes which are scanned by the ticket takers at the parks. Presumably, the original tickets' bar codes then would show up as invalid if someone tried to use them to get into a game. Without the agreement with MLB, I don't think the tickets from your hypothetical site would be linked to the stadium ticket database (or whatever), and therefore you wouldn't be able to offer the print-at-home feature which makes Stubhub selling/buying convenient and which allows for last-minute sales.
I dunno, it seems like there's probably 100 models that you could all justify as being "pure supply and demand".
I suppose you might say that, but in the deal I'm talking about, the "demand" would be from people who actually were going to be at the game(s). The middleman (who isn't "demanding" to attend the game himself) would be almost completely eliminated, due to the requirement that the ticket(s) would be useable by only the person whose name was on it. The only time a middleman could get in on the act would be if the would-be ticket purchaser was busy during the auction and had to commission a third party to buy the tickets in his name(s) for a fee. And even that would probably only last for as long as a program to automate one's personal bidding could be introduced. A truly enterprising middleman could probably get around that by acting as an agent for multiple buyers who hadn't installed such programs, but his work would be still be a lot more complicated than it is today.
Of course with this setup you'd probably have a few games where TV cameramen would be fired for panning the crowds, but after a few such experiences the Yankees might start pricing their tickets at a level that's more reflective of the actual demand to go to a game, as opposed to a demand to engage in a variant of penny stock speculation.
EDIT: As a small refinement, you could eliminate the four ticket limit for games where the demand was minimal. That way if someone wanted to take (for instance) a dozen of his nieces and nephews to a game, he wouldn't be prevented from doing so. And if the Yankees sold groups of tickets with adjacent seats as a bloc, they'd probably get more than they would by selling them individually. That's almost always the case for traditional scalpers, whose highest demand comes from couples rather than individuals.
It was pretty cool. I was at a 1:00 Mets game, found the person on Craigslist, did the whole transaction electronically, and went to the 4:00 Yankees game.
I assume those tickets were originally bought from the Yankees as E-Tickets, right? I don't think that would be possible if the person you bought them from had physical tickets bought from the Yankees (which is possible with Stubhub). And you had to trust that he wasn't sending those tickets to multiple people.
A friend of mine has a small season ticket package (Friday night home games) and I'm going to Mets @ Yankees this week. That's still enough of a draw that the $23 ticket is still a pretty good price; StubHub's cheapest for that game are $39.94.
And yeah, there's always a bit of trust required on Craigslist.
Maybe season tickets?
Season tickets typically come with a "handling fee." I once had a spirited conversation with a lady at a baseball ticket office during which I asked her exactly what the staff at the ticket office did, since the physical act of selling a ticket apparently counted as something above and beyond.
suck ####### balls
I need Richard Dawson's or Charles Nelson Reilly's help on this one.
Richard was always the preferred match, but if the topic is sucking balls, for the $500 answer I'm going to have to go with Big Chuck.
Actually there is one place where it is still fee-less. The Astros ticket windows in the park won't charge ANY fees except sales taxes on the tickets they sell.
If I want to get tix to all 3 games of a series, I bite the bullet and pay the online fees for the 1st game and then buy from the ticket office in the park for the next two. The money I save is nice, but I just refuse to pay their "convenience" and others fees.
Only because of the deceptive advertising practices of Big Peanut Butter. Oh sure, they SAY it's "creamy", but there's no actual cream in it! People with lactose intolerance could be tricked into getting chunky style, but I guess you lackies of the fat-cat peanut butter barons just don't care about consumers the way he does.
This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with a "purer form" of supply and demand, but is just one of Andy's random whims, like having ten page disclaimers on peanut butter to explain why their jars don't offer customer support.
Yes, I suppose it is a random whim to think that people who actually plan to attend a game are more reflective of a demand to attend that game than people who want to buy tickets purely for speculation. Of course my plan would favor the former group of people, so I can understand your reflexive hostility to it.
That's not to say that other arrangements don't also meet a supply / demand definition, and I don't have anything particularly against StubHub, but there's no question that the current method of ticket marketing and distribution is based on exploiting the fear of being shut out of critical games, and that the main beneficiaries of this method are (a) the Yankees and other relatively high demand teams, and (b) speculators and middlemen.
Of course speculators (such as some season ticket holders) at least assume actual risk in putting out money in advance for games that have uncertain future demand. There are no guaranteed profits in their business. And middlemen like StubHub provide service in the form of convenience, and also enable buyers to find bargains to some events. So there's give-and-take to their m.o.
But when the Yankees try to have it both ways, that's when the stench level really rises. Even a reflexive corporate mouthpiece like you has to acknowledge that their case against StubHub is motivated by no real principle other than pure self-interest. And while there's nothing illegal or particularly unusual about such magnificent chutzpah, it hardly deserves any response other than a big Bronx cheer.
That said, StubHub gets the tickets to those who can use them at a price they are willing to pay. What's not to like?
The last time I used StubHub, which admittedly was a couple of years ago and was for concert tickets, they wouldn't show you the exact seat location, only the row (which can make a HUGE deal in concert seating if you're on one of the wings) AND they didn't have any mechanism through which you could email the seller and find out.
Plus, yeah, the ####### fees ...
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