The Yankee game was on TV last night and I noticed from the centerfield shot that many of the seats behind the plate were vacant. At first I just chalked it up to the early hour; people probably hadn’ arrived yet. I subsequently switched to the Mets game and thought no more of it.
Until this morning. In this piece — which appears on the front page (and is continued in the “A” — not the sports — section) of The New York Times, Ken Belson (with Richard Sandomir) writes that perhaps both local teams should have given building new ball parks a bit more thought. Granted, they might not have been able to foresee hoe the economy would fall into the wood chipper, but
The empty seats are a fresh sign that the teams might have miscalculated how much fans and corporations were willing to spend, particularly during a deep recession. Whatever the reason, the teams are scrambling to comb over their $295- to $2,625-a-seat bald spots.
The article quotes Jon Greenberg, executive editor of the Team Marketing Report, “This is the worst possible time to debut a stadium.”
Ya think?
“The price of an average premium ticket is $510 for the Yankees and $150 for the Mets. The prices of nonpremium tickets rose 76 percent this year at Yankee Stadium, which goes a long way toward offsetting losses from unsold premium seats.”
$510 for ONE ticket? DAMMMMNNN!
Heaven forbid they should drop the prices a bit. Why? Would that be admitting defeat of some sort?
“The teams are loath to cut prices for fear of alienating existing ticket-holders,” Belson writes. “Letting fans from other sections move to the premium seats behind home plate and above the dugouts could backfire in the same way.” Okay, I can understand that.
My wife and I have been offered tickets for a couple of games at Citi Field. Way down in the right field corner, $75 bucks a pop. No thanks.
The “pull quote” for the Times‘ story: “Even if you build it, sometimes they don’t come.”
A.J. Burnett of the Yankees pitching in front of sparsely populated premium seats on Sunday. Photo by Barton Silverman, NY Times
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We had the same problem in Washington, DC last year. Tickets weren’t as expensive as in NY, but for our market were over the top. It made the stadium look even more bare than it really was (and it didn’t exactly set a new park attendance record as it was).
Some sort of reverse auction, with seat prices declining as game time approaches would seem to make sense to me. The teams would get top $$$ that people were actually willing to pay.
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