This post has reached r/all or r/popular, which means it’s now being seen by a much wider audience outside our usual community. To help keep the discussion high-quality and protect the space from spam, trolling, and rule-breaking, we’ve turned on "Players Only" mode.
What that means:
Regular contributors (based on subreddit karma) can comment freely on the post while this mode is active.
Comments from users below that threshold will be held for review and approved if they are not rule-breaking.
Thanks for your understanding and for helping keep the conversation thoughtful and on-topic.
It's such a weird business strategy for teams MLB to not sell the seat so they don't "devalue" it instead of lowering the price and still make money not just on the seat but on whatever concessions or merch the attendees may buy.
It's like when you hear about Louis Vuitton burning unsold merchandise at the end of the year instead of lowering the price.
I honestly think the potentially best strategy is making the tickets as cheap as possible most of the time, get the people in, which a Lower barrier for entry is a higher chance for long term fans, and once they are in the stadium it’s a near guarantee they’ll be spending money on everything else, more businesses should follow the drug dealer ideology
Donate unsold tickets to local school kids and their families. Build up a larger fan base over the long term, gain some goodwill in the community and fill the place at the same time.
I feel like minor league teams do this. I buy $7 cheap seats (which are still great) and then end up dropping like $40 a person on beer, food, and merch
The math checks out with luxury goods, and unfortunately all these sports and teams are doing the same math for themselves...
Personally I think it's way too short sighted...Louis Vuitton only has one way to make money, and that's directly selling the goods.
But teams can make money off tickets, merch, broadcasting, etc. You're right that they should be filling those seats, because they can make more money by having more passionate fans
They also miss out on the "I'm on a budget but need to entertain a child for 3 hours" crowd which means they're missing out on opportunities to make lifelong fans
these teams are making their stadiums smaller and smaller. No one builds a smaller stadium, all of them build smaller. The Tigers, The Yankees, The Indians/Guardians did it decades ago and now they are really getting smaller. Look at Las Vegas, for example. Baseball owners' dream would be a stadium for 10 fans with artificial loud noise to make it seem like there are huge numbers of people where those 10 fans pay $10 million per seat per game.
They’re smaller by general seating standards, most modern stadiums are designed to have more boxes and suites. Why work hard to curry fan favor to sell a lot of cheap seats, when you can sell boxes to companies who don’t care about team performance?
Cleveland also has a lot of standing room tickets and have added bars/areas for people to hang out without an assigned seat - at the cost of removing some seating
Exactly! It's brilliant. By making the local populace pay the team tax money, you don't even have to give them a seat at the game to get cash from them.
It's football and not baseball, but Pete Rozelle shortly after he retired apparently said that if some NFL owners had their way, all the games would be played in an unusually large TV studio. That was over 30 years ago.
The sports leagues' platonic idea is one jointly owned facility with multiple "stadiums" and players stay there year round. No travel fees or logistic costs, no need to worry about scheduling besides first and last at bats, most of the "seating" reserved for billionaires and their entourages, with maybe some seats available by paid lottery for additional revenue. A sports Disneyworld.
pro tip - if you do go to staples center for ufc or basketball, get the cheapest nosebleed seats possible in the far ends of the oval.
You can see and hear the court/ring/whatever's going on perfectly because of how steep it is, and the overhang of the 2nd level. and you also have like an 80-foot video screen directly in front of you (not obscuring the court or anything.) like you get Movie theater size replays right in front of you.
It's a great view, it's less crowded (to the point the ushers don't care if you move to a better seat) .. I've done this every time I go and it's super chill. Even if it's "sold out" most of that area will be pretty sparse.
Fenway was the smallest stadium in the league for like 80 years. Today, Cleveland and Miami are smaller, and Pittsburgh has only slightly more capacity. And Fenway is expensive as fuck.
At least at fenway you’re at least remotely close to the action from almost any seat. Sitting in some cheap seats at other stadiums feels like you’re in the next county over. The nosebleeds in San Francisco you literally need binoculars to see anything
A lot of that is the loss of bench seating. Despite not being the physically largest building, Lambeau has the second-highest seating capacity of any NFL stadium because it still is (mostly) steel benches.
They’ve basically determined that people buying the cheap seats aren’t spending enough money on concessions and merch. So it’s more profitable for them to leave the seat empty. Shitty trend in sports. Everything is moving towards catering toward fewer but richer fans.
Gotta love America, all hail the Almighty dollar sign.
It's dumb, and infuriating. as a browns fan, they're talking about $200 minimum for the cheapest seats at the new stadium in brook park. That prices out your average fan in the city.
And with such a crap product and inept leadership year after year, you'd ask yourself who'd be crazy enough to pay that much? This may be part of the answer
What they don't account for is what you mentioned, less fans keep coming, the data skews, and 5 years later when they reexamine the data, they will say they need to maximize revenue by keeping seats sold.
"Ah shit, are you saying you ran the numbers again and selling MORE tickets is GOOD?!?"
Seriously though, I can totally see how they'd get blinded by big spikes in demand and think there's enough people willing to pay $x after looking at the secondary market, etc... and then just overshoot your shot.
Yup make the most money this quarter, but then thousands of kids don't go to your game and fall in love with baseball, and thousands of adults find other things to do than spend the night watching your product.
Or don’t watch your (162) games on over-the-air channels while they’re growing up and become lifelong fans. But the owner’s looking to sell the team in 3-5 years so not their concern.
It’s just a supply and demand chart where the max profit (equilibrium price) is met at a point that does not sell out the stadium.
They’ve done the math, and apparently, “still making some money” on cheaper seats doesn’t actually bring more overall than having some empty seats at higher prices.
Not endorsing it, just saying what I think is happening here.
It's funny watching everyone squabble, like each billionaire doesn't have the same guys doing the same math on the same four dozen numbers to maximize revenue. Even Rollercoaster Tycoon taught that.
Right? Either keep the expensive food and sell the tickets cheaper or have expensive tickets and cheap food. They can't have it both ways anymore. People can't afford it and the corporate ticket plans can't fill the whole building
Word. My wife used to work at a hotel. Their philosophy was "heads in beds". Selling a room for cheaper at the end of the night is better than an empty room everyday
Say it's 1000 seats total that are empty. 80x1000 is another $80,000 in revenue.
Say 500 of those people buy a hot dog that pays you $6 profit. Another 30k
I haven't even mentioned, beer, merch, soda, popcorn or parking....it's significant revenue being left on the table for.......... Not devaluing the other tickets? I think they found that people aren't willing to pay $185 to sit there. But they would pay something else. I don't see how it impacts the fan in the lower bowls perspective of the brand. Like I just don't understand this
I remember arguing about this with some friends during college while at a minor league game where there are thousands of empty seats. They kept yelling about the opportunity cost and how it loses money to give away tickets to people and I was just saying "what opportunity??? Look around you, there are 500 people here!!! Nobody is paying for these tickets!"
Some people get ideas in their head from business school and never let go of them. They'd rather lose a real $110,000 in revenue than a theoretical $180,000 revenue that won't materialize.
Louis Vuitton makes sense though. You want the people wearing your brand to be a certain type of person. You don’t want them to be the people who found it for cheap at Ross. That’s part of protecting a brand.
You know what isn’t protecting your brand? Making your stadium empty during a playoff game. It would help your brand to sell cheap seats and sell out than have a good per seat margin and have empty sections. Not only would it help your brand, you’d likely make more money like you stated through more tickets, concessions, merch, etc. Let alone the 10 year old that got to go and enjoy a playoff game and it makes him a bigger fan for the future.
I’m sure it looks good in some spreadsheet though, so that’s cool.
I mean even at 40 dollar jump is gonna probably fill most of the seats. $100 is so much more than $80 that they are shooting themselves in the foot. I am willing to bet the fact they more than double is the biggest reason most people are going to just stay home. People don’t like to feel like they’re getting ripped off. The fact the seat behind you costs $100 less is just so crazy to think about, but if it was $40 more then I’m sure more fans would see it more as a result of demand for cheaper seats and the $40 dollar extra seats would be more seen as a the price of not being early enough for the cheaper option.
I can’t speak for the Rays but Louis Vuitton caters to a certain group of people and I believe there’s actual example and analysis backing up doing what they do to keep their demo
Oddly enough, the Rays have also operated on this model. There are plenty of other options for baseball in the Bay area, so they price theirs as the premium offering. Not saying I agree with it, but a lot of their moves like going cash free and closing the upper deck most of the time while keeping lower deck seats expensive speak to the strategy.
This is backed up by companies like Audemars Piguet who require applications for purchases of their watches purely so that undesireables aren't caught wearing (and 'devaluing') them. They want to be purely for the elite.
I dont know if this directly applies. But there is a whole economic theory behind this. At the end of the day they want people that are going to spend money.
A decent example is an airline would rather have 1 customer that pays 200$ than two customers that pay $100. If someone is bringing a family and willing to pay premium, then they're likely to pay premium for everything else at the event. They would rather have a half filled stadium of people willing& able to splurge and spend twice as much, then a full stadium with people that aren't willing or able to spend more. It also means they can have less overhead of catering to double the amount of people( less concession workers, lower utility bills for restrooms, etc etc)..there is certainly a price point in there where it will lose them money. But thats the general idea behind it
Interestingly, a similar concept gets talked about a lot with regards to Overwatch skins, most of which are $20 (which, insane to me that people pay that). Recently they made skins that are $40 and yeah people whine and whine but you still see them every game. They’re not halving the amount of people that buy a skin, so it’s economically viable to charge exorbitant prices. Supposedly the game is kept alive by a small percentage of players lol
Maybe this is just me coping since they’re the cheapest but I honestly love sitting high up at games lol. Love me a good full view of the field and city backgrounds
Agreed, except at the Trop, some of these seats have obstructed views because left field is blocked by a catwalk, and there’s no view of the city at all.
Mariners tickets last year for those seats in the ALCS were $350 if you got them through the season ticket plan, $550 if you got them in the lottery sale, $1k once the scalpers got them
Yeah pretty sure my Astros Yankees alcs lottery were $400 and they were like 2nd row from the top. There was a different atmosphere up there with the top open.
Great American Ballpark (Reds) has in app ticket upgrades. But it’s poorly baked. They should be available a day or even a week before the game. Pretty sure right now it’s only available day-of, and I’ve never seen a price worth paying.
They’d fill way more premium seats if they did it like airlines do, ramp down the price as you get closer to game day. It’s a lot of the same economics as a flight
I think it’d be an absolutely hilarious way the end the season right before a massive labour dispute - a World Series with half full stadiums and only 200k people watching on TV
When I move down seats I'll always check the secondary market first to find seats that are still for sale because I know if I can get passed the usher with a beer and a dog in my hand that the ticket holder of section 20, row 15, seat 7 isn't in the building because it's still on StubHub.
An old coworker of mine wrote a bit of software that would grab all the available tickets on the secondary market, then buy the cheapest thing and print off a handful of dummy tickets with section and seat of the best empties to go sit in. Pretty sure he said he added functionality that if the listing got taken down it would text him so he could leave before anyone showed up.
I know it’s a highly-marketable playoff game, but how can the average, middle-class American family expect to be able to afford this?
Even $80 seats x4 = $320 without accounting for food eaten during the day, or even the gas it took to get to the stadium…
I’m from Pittsburgh and even during the regular season the cheapest tickets are the outfield bleachers for $40 each. Half-decent seats are $70+ for a team that refuses to give its fans any hope of playoff contention.
I understand the sentiment but I gotta be honest, $80 to get in the door for the ALCS is not that bad. It’s not like this is an every day or even every year event.
Now, there are plenty of regular season games that cost $80. THAT is an issue, imo.
I agree with the prices being crazy…that said, it’s still mind blowing that a city can’t pack a stadium for an ALCS game. And from the Cleveland and José chants, there had to be around 15-20 percent guardians fans there.i love the rays story and all that, but I can’t get too far behind a team who’s city couldn’t care less.
It blows my mind that the city just doesn't support them. They've been consistently good. It's not like they're putting out a shitty product, and that's why the city abandoned them.
One of the reasons I think Astros games have gotten so much quieter is that, as the novelty of actually having a competent baseball team wore off, fans weren't willing to pay outrageous prices.
They essentially priced out the psychos and diehards.
Meaning we get these like golf/tennis types going to Astros games now.
Those prices are robbery. I travel for work decently often and always try to go to a game if I can. Mid-market teams usually have pretty affordable tickets, under $20-30 if you don’t mind where you sit, although helps if it’s a random weekday night of course. I usually always wind up paying more for beer than the ticket itself.
An $80 ticket for an LCS game is crazy. My Wildcard tickets cost more than that, and LCS tickets are many hundreds or thousands depending on the section.
Rays attendance is largely based on who they're playing. Not a chance in hell those seats aren't taken if they're playing the Yankees or Red Sox. Team deserves so much better than this man
There's something wrong with these Florida teams, both Marlins and Rays. They won't pack these important games. I have heard the Marlins built on beloved football stadium, but still, it makes no sense to me.
Actually, the Marlins haven’t hosted a home playoff game since 2003. But they drew over 60,000 for every single playoff game in 2003. And for their playoff games, they only failed to draw under 50,000 twice, when they drew 41K and 42K for their two Divisional Series games against the Giants in 1997. Marlins fans actually do support their team when they were doing well.
The Marlins won it all twice.. then traded away their team each time, which gave fans no reason to maintain loyalty if ownership keeps getting rid of what you enjoy.
I get the impression the Rays have tried more than the Marlins, but it might be a combination of stadium location and demographics that never got the same fans support as the Bucs (NFL)and Lightning.(NHL)
I get the fans who are buying the $80 over the $180, but if I went online to buy tix and only saw those $180 left I would recognize that as an incredible deal for a freaking ALCS game, plus the first one at that stadium in 18 years. It’s ridiculous that those are empty.
They just did a big loop with the camera around the mound in the bottom of the 1st and it looked more full to me. We sure the OP isn’t fucking with us with a pic taken before first pitch but posted at start time?
If you are right, this photo still shows something with the distribution of people: $80 ticket holders and the lower bowl arrive earlier than $180 ticket holders. (I have no clue what that means though).
It was odd seeing so many people defend Rays playoff attendance when we came to town.
It's okay to say that they traditionally don't fill out the Trop, even during the playoffs. Maybe the new stadium fixes things, but it's not like we're trying to shit on em.
I have started buying the cheapest ticket I can find on the secondary market, then later into the game I will check Gametime and buy seats super close.
There are almost always good seats selling for a fraction of their ticket price when the scalpers are looking to unload.
It doesn’t always work, but it does like 75 percent of the time.
I don't understand this lol. The brewers tickets are INSANELY high priced and we're a small market team. I'd be at every postseason game if there were tickets for 80 dollars.
Respect to the Rays fans, price should equal demand. We always talk about how game / concert prices are out of control, but it's that way because people keep paying ridiculous prices. People seem to be buying the $80 tickets, why wouldn't you at least lower the price in that section? It doesn't really make sense those seats are more than double the price anyway, the price is totally arbitrary.
Nah. In the early 2000s the White Sox would have discounted nights and there were like $8 tickets. I went to a Mariners game this year for $15 a ticket
I used to go to Oakland games on Wednesday where the hot dogs were $1 and the tickets were $2. So the upper part would be pretty full and the lower part pretty empty. Even after the 6th inning the ushers would hassle us if we tried to move down.
•
u/trendingtattler 2d ago
This post has reached r/all or r/popular, which means it’s now being seen by a much wider audience outside our usual community. To help keep the discussion high-quality and protect the space from spam, trolling, and rule-breaking, we’ve turned on "Players Only" mode.
What that means:
Thanks for your understanding and for helping keep the conversation thoughtful and on-topic.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.