Friday, May 24, 2013
Fay Vincent: THE UMPIRE FIX
(www.murraychass.com)
TONY RANDAZZO NO MISTER ROCK AND ROLL, MR. COMMISSIONER.
Read More...Major League Baseball should immediately adopt reforms to the umpiring system. MLB is now a $7 billion dollar industry awash in cash so the costs of these changes can hardly be the reason to defer making them.
1. MLB should buy the umpire schools and take over the training and development of all umpires in professional baseball. The recruitment, training and compensation of minor league and major league umpires should be controlled ...
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1 2 >Stubhub is really easy, especially if the tickets are instantly downloadable. I was able to get tickets for the US Open final last week in about a minute. I've gotten tickets for plays and such, too.
I was in the Tampa area last March for Spring Training. My cousin and I decided to go to the Lightning game last minute. Since it was about 60 minutes from game time, we decided to head down and look for scalpers. Instead, we found a hotel across the street from the arena. Got on Stubhub using their lobby computers. Paid $20 per ticket for second row seats. Also came with an all you can eat buffet and all you can drink beer. Face value of those tickets was about $150. That was a fun night...
Even if these tickets were just 5 dollars below box-office prices, then people would still buy them from StubHub and the Yankees would get exactly the same amount of money ($0) for the transactions. How cheap they are doesn't actually matter.
so the yankees are 'seething' over not getting a second cut of the action? or something?
Well, the Yankees get money indirectly through the agreement with Stubhub - and for the tickets in question they have already gotten money with the initial sale.
But that's not how the model works, exactly. The Yankees sell the ticket once, at face value. And then, AFAIK, they get a small percentage (how figured, I'm not sure) of the resale transaction. It's not that seats are somehow disappearing from their inventory for free. Their dissatisfaction with StubHub is entirely due to a feeling that they're not getting enough of a percentage on the deal.
Edit: I should give up and open a Coke franchise.
That's what I was thinking too. So the Yankees sell 1000 tickets at full price to stub hub, stub hub realizes there's not much demand for the tickets and sells them at a big loss. Now the Yankees are mad because they can't have all the money from stub hub for empty seats, plus full price money from the few fans who actually want those tickets.
This is the exact kind of problem that the free market can solve. Businesses that complain about the market, who can't accept the bad with the good deserve FDR-Truman-Eisenhower levels of marginal taxation. Or the gulag. Or both.
Does StubHub actually take and hold inventory? I thought they were solely a market maker, like Ebay.
You are right.
The team sells a ticket to someone (with ticketmaster or tickets.com getting a fee if bought online). This person then sells the ticket to someone else on stubhub (with stubhub taking a fee from both seller and buyer).
If tickets are available at face value, I'd think part of the Yankees' concern is these purchases are cutting into walkup sales.
But StubHub also makes it easier for people to underwrite, rather than use, season tickets. It's hard to believe the benefit of that doesn't dwarf the walkup downside, but that's an empirical queation with an empirical answer.
Part of this is likely just Yankee arrogance and Yankee overrating of how popular they actually are. It really isn't that big a shock that you can get into their games for $10.
I wonder if MLB could create a team-wide ticket sale and electronic ticketing service. It could be like what the Kroenke-run sports teams and concert venues in Denver and a few others (Cleveland Cavs, Miami Heat I think) use: Another Kroenke business called Tickethorse. Electronic distribution is done via the related company and site Flash seats.
You scan in at the gate with a credit card or drivers' license. If you need to distribute the tickets you can forward them through the site by referencing another user by their associated email address. So if you have tickets and a friend is meeting you at the park but will be late or something, you just transfer his ticket to him. You can also buy and sell the tickets anonymously from/to others registered on the site, and it's very quick. I had some seats that neither I nor friends could use so I put them up for sale a couple hours before the game and someone bought them.
I doubt MLB "lacks the time" to do this...I imagine there's quite a capital expense since this system would need to be able to handle a fair volume if it were done MLB-wide.
Yeah, I think that's it. Having the re-sale market be efficient and user-friendly is good for the Yankees when face value is near or below market value, but bad for them when face value is overpriced - because an efficient and easy re-sale mechanism allows even those willing to pay face get it for less and therefore not buying another ticket from the Yankees. They don't seem to give a #### how it affects their customers.
From the article: "The Yankees have been pressuring StubHub to place a minimum price at which people can resell the tickets."
No mention about the Yankees pressuring for a maximum price, naturally.
That's fair enough, but if 60,000 people wanted to go to every game, the issue would disappear. The problem arises when they sell 40,000 tickets in a 50,000 seat stadium, but only 30,000 people want to go to the game. That's been happening in Arlington at every game I've gone to recently, BTW, and I have to think that StubHub is an excellent mechanism for dealing with it. I always buy StubHub; I get a good seat under face value (and not in the sunfield, is our main concern here), and unlike the empty (sold) seats around me, I occupy mine, pay to park, drink beer, eat hotdogs, and the Rangers get their little cut of my resale purchase on top of the face value. As AROM says, love that free market.
When I see the words "Arneson" and "Alignment" in the same sentence, my old-school gamer roots kick in. Let's re-organize the teams according to alignment. We'd have 9 divisions, so 6 will have 3 teams and 3 will have 4. But which teams go where?
Lawful Good
Neutral Good
Chaotic Good
Lawful Neutral
Neutral Neutral
Chaotic Neutral
Lawful Evil
Neutral Evil
Chaotic Evil
Twins
Reds
Pirates
Neutral Good (Easy to root for teams)
Brewers
Giants
DBacks
Chaotic Good
Rays (do things “the wrong way”)
A’s (do things “the wrong way”)
Cubs (Not really good, but chaotic neutral is reserved for worse messes)
Lawful Neutral
Mariners
Nationals (Strictly follow rules (shutdown) whatever the implications)
Royals (everything will work out if they stick to “the plan”)
True Neutral (Boring organizations)
Braves
Blue Jays
Indians
Padres
Chaotic Neutral
Mets
Astros
Rockies
Lawful Evil (try to win by outspending their opponents
Phillies
Dodgers
Tigers
Angels
Neutral Evil (Teams disliked for reasons that have nothing to do with the on-field performance)
Rangers (former owner)
Orioles (owner)
White Sox (play-by-play announcer)
Chaotic Evil
Red Sox
Yankees
Marlins
Cardinals
Is this code for drunk and wearing Ralph Lauren polo shirts?
How am I able to print my ticket right from StubHub then? They have to "hold it" in a physical or virtual sense. For that matter, how do you sell tickets on StubHub without actually mailing them the tickets?
I've always figured that's why there has to be an agreement between the Yankees and StubHub. You need Yankee buy-in for it to work, right?
When selling, you type in a string of numbers and letters which are located right next to the barcode on the physical ticket. When you buy, you are emailed PDF's of a ticket which you print out. The barcode on this printout is coordinated with the scanner at the turnstile - which is where the agreement with MLB comes in. I would think that once you sell a ticket this way, the barcode on the original ticket would not successfully scan at the ballpark.
I guess technically you could say that for the few moments after a buyer agrees and before they email them the tickets that stubhub is holding the tickets.
It is technically in Stubhub's possession. I don't think you can say they resell it. They're not acting as a distributor, an entity that actually buys product, say lumber, from one larger producer and then sells it at some later point to another customer, but in between owns that inventory. They're more like the transportation company that delivers the order of wood from seller to buyer.
Basically, yes. They get a % of the secondary market but they don't think it is high enough. Blatant greed is what we're talking about here.
I used to be a season ticket holder for the Padres for many years - finally gave up the season tix because I was having to sell or give away too many tix for games I couldn't attend. Decided to just buy a few games a year and it costs a lot less than the package I was paying for before. I'm also now sitting in much better seats for the games I'm going to. I usually get them through Stub Hub and it's been a mixed bag - for a better matchup against a desirable team they are usually priced a little over face value but there have also been some that were well under, too, so I have no complaints. I suppose if I were buying cheap seats for the less desirable games I could probably be getting those for $2 a game.
That is the way I was thinking, Ticket Master is a horrible entity, and Stub Hub is just short of incredible, so of course MLB is looking into ruining a great fan experience and trying to maximize profits.
Stubhub was rumoured to have profit margins of 2.5% when it was sold to EBay in 2007 ($10m on $400m in annual "sales"). Not sure what they counted as sales, if it's ticket fees it looked like they needed more economies of scale. If its actual selling price of tickets, they may have had great margins on their actual revenues, ie fees, but not enough business.
Not defending ticketmaster, but I do think consumers underestimate costs of providing tickets.
Edit: or not. More recent estimate that would put after tax earnings around $50m, on $325m in revenues.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2011/08/05/stubhub-dominates-the-secondary-ticket-market/
Went to Arizona spring training a couple of years ago, and the went to 3-4 different parks. The ones that used ticketmaster had fees of around $10-15 per transaction, the Brewers didn't use them and the fees were like $2.50.
Ticketmaster gouges you.
Wow, lots of WS trophies in Chaotic Evil
They aren't selling out every game, but the Yankees are leading the league in attendance. Probably making a lot more at ~44,000 per game than they would at Old Yankee Stadium with 54,000 per game. Still, everyone wants to do a little better.
That seems really low to me. Guess I just don't have a good idea of the size of the market.
As a yankee fan who had an impossible time getting decent seats before it existed, and getting seats where I like 'em (upstairs, behind Home, anywhere between 419-421) a few times a year for good prices (sometimes below face sometimes above, but usually about avg) I am NOT looking forward to any change in the system.
As far as the Yankees, they overpriced and are now stuck with a stadium way less full than it was the last few years. Some sections are embarrasing (very expensive downstatirs). I went to a game a few weeks ago with my 12 year old for free - just by filling up my car a few times at Hess; and the seats were in the 300 section. With a little scouting around we ended up sitting behind home plate in the cushion seats.
If the yankees are unhappy, they should lower their prices and give the public as good an experience as Stub Hub (choose seat SECTION and ROW). When I go to the Yankee site there are never seats avaialble.
GO STUB HUB
And happy new year to all.
It seems that some teams that don't always sell out will dump blocks of tix on the local agencies for way below face value, and of course the agencies would then re-sell for whatever profit they could make. This often involved putting a small army of scalpers out on the streets around the park with tix in-hand, trying to sell as many as possible.
Ever wonder why you see scalpers outside the park on a Tuesday night in April when a bad draw is in town?
Anyway, it worked well for both sides: Agencies made a few bucks on the cheap tix and the team made some too, as well as the parking and concessions. Even the guys on the street that did the hustling and selling got a commish, or so I'm assuming. Even the fans won, since a lot of times you could get tickets from these guys at face value and sometimes even a few bucks cheaper.
When I first heard that SH had done a deal with not only MLB, but also the NFL, I figure that the teams were going to use SH as their very own scalping outfit. They would have a place to dump unsold tix, sometimes for more than face value, sometimes not.
And as far as I know, the whole transaction process is pretty much anonymous, so you wouldn't necessarily know who you were buying tickets from, or whether it was a season ticket holder, or the team itself.
I don't know for sure if that's what's happening, but it sure seems plausible. I figure that some teams, i.e. NYY, are not getting the top-dollar they were getting five or six years ago (pre-meltdown), so they're using the threat of TM to gouge more money out of SH. Of course, if the ducats aren't selling for much, or aren't selling in large volume, then the money just won't be there.
Ticketmaster gouges you.
Ticketmaster kicks a lot of the "fees" back to the team. In many cases, they charge the fees even if you purchase at the venue! So they're not gouging you so much as conspiring with the team to create an artificially low face value.
I read an article written by an ex-TicketMaster employee, who said that that was basically their business model. When they market themselves to concert venues, they basically say, "We'll be the bad guys that enable you guys to raise prices."
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