It's clear they need a subsidy to compete.

Never mind the CPI and all that, it's still somewhat melancholy to note that for the price of parking your car at one game in 2014, you could have sat in the bleachers for Mickey Mantle's entire rookie season. Or you could have bought a season ticket for the best box seat in the Stadium for the price of one game's ticket today, and still had plenty of money left over for hot dogs, beer and the subway. Oh, and the World Series, too.

It's true that the beer was Ballantine's and not some yuppie designer brand, but those were hard times, and there was a war going on. You had to make sacrifices somewhere.

And yet in those dreadful days of 91% tax rates, the clueless Yankees never figured how to get the government to use any of that dough to pay for Toots Shor's parking space. It took the re-invention of "free market" economics for them to come up with a solution for that....

you could have sat in the bleachers for Mickey Mantle's entire rookie season.

... if you didn't have a job.

Even a lot later on when I started attending ML games in the late eighties, an upper box seat was about the cost of a movie ticket in most ML parks, about what I'd think they should be based on a 162-game season, etc. Now the upper box seat in my closest park is $22, more in others.

It's still the most affordable major sport, by far, but they sure have eclipsed my old 'movie ticket' benchmark by a good margin.

As for this 'hidden subsidy', Inspector Renault would be shocked, eh?

you could have sat in the bleachers for Mickey Mantle's entire rookie season.

... if you didn't have a job.

Yeah, that's one of history's great mysteries, how they ever found 70,000 unemployed bums in a city of 8 million people to fill up Yankee Stadium for all those afternoon World Series games.

Any doubt that the "VIPs" will include the very politicians that voted for this embarrassment?

It's still the most affordable major sport, by far, but they sure have eclipsed my old 'movie ticket' benchmark by a good margin.

I'm not even sure that's accurate if you consider that a game is only one act in a 162-act drama.

you could have sat in the bleachers for Mickey Mantle's entire rookie season.

... if you didn't have a job.

Yeah, that's one of history's great mysteries, how they ever found 70,000 unemployed bums in a city of 8 million people to fill up Yankee Stadium for all those afternoon World Series games.

There were probably a lot of night shift jobs back in the days when manufacturing was done in the US...

...and when New York City itself was a manufacturing center.

Yeah, that's one of history's great mysteries, how they ever found 70,000 unemployed bums in a city of 8 million people to fill up Yankee Stadium for all those afternoon World Series games.

The 1951 World Series didn't draw 70,000 people for any game. And I thought we were talking about his "entire rookie season," not a handful of special games at the end of the year.

Never mind the CPI and all that, it's still somewhat melancholy to note that for the price of parking your car at one game in 2014, you could have sat in the bleachers for Mickey Mantle's entire rookie season.

... if you didn't have a job.

Yeah, that's one of history's great mysteries, how they ever found 70,000 unemployed bums in a city of 8 million people to fill up Yankee Stadium for all those afternoon World Series games.

The 1951 World Series didn't draw 70,000 people for any game. And I thought we were talking about his "entire rookie season," not a handful of special games at the end of the year.

David, my post was nothing more than answering one non sequitur with another, and I think I know why attendance rises for night games. But the fact of those ticket prices remains regardless of who was likely to be buying the tickets.

David, my post was nothing more than answering one non sequitur with another

My response was not at all a non sequitur. Prices are not determined arbitrarily, but by supply and demand. The fact that the games were played in the afternoon severely depressed demand.

My response was not at all a non sequitur. Prices are not determined arbitrarily, but by supply and demand. The fact that the games were played in the afternoon severely depressed demand.

David, I know all that, and believe it or not I knew all that before I made my first post in this thread. I probably even knew that before you were born. What was non sequiturish about your post was that it was an answer to a political question that hadn't been posed in the first place. Whatever political point there was in my original post had to do with taxpayer-subsidized parking, which I'm sure we both agree is deplorable.

My response was not at all a non sequitur. Prices are not determined arbitrarily, but by supply and demand. The fact that the games were played in the afternoon severely depressed demand.

In a market in which demand is subsidized, it is incorrect to state that prices are determined by supply and demand. Many of the new Yankee Stadium seats, including a significant majority of the most expensive seats, will be subsidized by the tax deduction the purchaser will receive.

From almost every angle, the modern major league baseball stadium is one big market-distorting government giveway to the people who need it least. And, indeed, the price of almost everything you'll see there, from the players' salaries to the prices of luxury suites, and the prices of concessions, is s distorted by one form or another of cartel, legalized price fixing, or other non-market mechanism. It resembles free market pricing barely more than grocery stores in Leningrad, ca. 1980.

In a market in which demand is subsidized, it is incorrect to state that prices are determined by supply and demand. Many of the new Yankee Stadium seats, including a significant majority of the most expensive seats, will be subsidized by the tax deduction the purchaser will receive.

There's an extent to which the second statement is true -- obviously it's true as a legal matter that one can take a tax deduction, but as a factual matter, I don't know what percentage of the seats fall into that category -- but it's not responsive to my point. Subsidizing the tickets shifts the demand curve, but doesn't change the fact that supply and demand set prices. Moreover, AFAIK, the only change in the situation since 1951 is that these sorts of expenses are less deductible than they used to be, thanks to the 1986 reforms.

crooked positicians (is there any other kind) subsidize all the high rollers who give em $$$ to re-run? how about that?

and supply and demand set ticket prices?

- what a total shock. i can't hardly believe it. here and i thought it was because all those horrible terrible greedy baseball players don't want to play for mcdonald wages because they aren't playing for the Love Of The Game like all the ballplayers did back in the pure old days when they had unblemished impeccable good character and wouldn't never drink nor smoke nor swear nor screw nor even think for one second bout ANY kind of behaviour that wasn't done by the purest of saints

well, actually, sarcasm aside, there is more to it then supply and demand because teams like the marlins that don't draw flies STILL have real high prices for the seats. no dollar days that is fer SHER

Lisa, I think we can say that supply and demand is the starting point for establishing ticket prices, but there are mitigating factors that pull different teams in contrary directions.

In the case of the Marlins, they likely don't want to give the impression that they're "giving their product away." For 23 years I had about the lowest prices in Washington in my book store, but I never had any "sale" until the last six weeks of my operation, and for that exact reason. Once you start discounting, it's hard to stop, and after a while customers more tend to remember that you've eliminated the bargains than that you had them in the first place.

And in the case of the Big Three high demand teams (Yanks, Sox, Cubs), they could almost certainly raise prices even more, at least for some games, but they choose not to in great part because even the greediest owners have to pay some attention to public perception. The Cubs, of course, try to have it both ways by use of their phony "ticket agencies." But nobody ever accused the Cubs of subtlety.

In a "perfect" ecnomic model, I suppose, we'd have auctions for all the seats: First for the season tickets, then for the partial plans, then for the choice games, then for the rest. But of course there are many reasons that would never happen, not the least of which is that the owners might not like the results.

Well, $70M for 660 spaces over 40 years, that works out to a mere $33/space/game. Such a bargain! Of course, there won't be any operating or capital maintenance expenses over that time.

BBC:
"behaviour"
Did Brattain give you his spell checker?

By the way, I saw the article a few days ago about the Yankees signing Juan Gonzalez. Is it really the former outfielder or is it the author of this article?

660 spaces seems like a very large VIP area. Do the members of Michael Kay's posse all roll in separate cars? The Cubs' players and VIP parking area is smaller than the parking lot for the McDonald's across Clark Street. Although the Cubs may not own "their" parking area at all. . .

andy

well when you only get a couple hundred people in a what 60,000 seat stadium, it might could be that you'd have SOME serious discount seats.

unless of course you get your money from the yanks and the sox and it makes zero difference whether or not anyone show up because you still make some 20-30 mill a year in profit

jwb,

if i could write like brattain i'd take spelling like him too

> they sure have eclipsed my old 'movie ticket' benchmark by a good margin

You can go to a Twins game for less than a first run movie ticket, especially if you take the train.

Do the members of Michael Kay's posse all roll in separate cars? The Cubs' players and VIP parking area is smaller than the parking lot for the McDonald's across Clark Street. Although the Cubs may not own "their" parking area at all. . .

Lord, I hadn't even thought that Micheal F/in Kay will probably get one of these spots.

Now I'm really mad.

andy

well when you only get a couple hundred people in a what 60,000 seat stadium, it might could be that you'd have SOME serious discount seats.

unless of course you get your money from the yanks and the sox and it makes zero difference whether or not anyone show up because you still make some 20-30 mill a year in profit

BBC,

Don't blame me for the Marlins. If it were up to me the only Major League Baseball you'd ever see in that entire sorry state would be in the month of March. If I were the Friendly Dictator of Baseball I'd move the Marlins to Brooklyn and the Devil Rays to Staten Island and let the whole thing sort itself out. And if Floridians yelled too loud I'd threaten to take away their dentures and be done with it. That'd learn em.

nobody ever accused the Cubs of subtlety.

Subtlety has never been a big Chicago virtue.

By the way, I saw the article a few days ago about the Yankees signing Juan Gonzalez. Is it really the former outfielder or is it the author of this article?

Six of one and half a dozen of the other, since they're both in their early 60's.

I wonder if forty years from now I'm going to sound just like my cranky old uncle, griping about how back in my day the cheap tickets were a measly thirty bucks and the highest paid players were only making twenty-eight million dollars a year.