Tuesday, October 22, 2013

New Yankee Ticket Prices For 2014 Are ... OK, I Guess?

The Yankees announced their new ticket prices for 2014 yesterday, and on the surface it looks like they're doing everybody a solid.  From the team:

"Prices for 96 percent of tickets will either remain the same or decrease.

Approximately 39,000 tickets (78 percent) will have the same price in 2014 as they had in 2013, while approximately 9,000 tickets (18 percent) will have a decrease in price. There are approximately 2,000 tickets (four percent) that will have an increase in price."

I don't want to come off like a complete malcontent here, because having 96% of tickets either stay the same or decrease in price is a good thing.  Everybody who's been to the new Stadium knows how much of a strain it can be on the wallet.  That's a lesson I learned the hard way during my Yankee weekend trip back in early September.  Keeping ticket prices as affordable as possible for the majority of the common fan is a good thing.

But when I read about how the 4% of ticket prices that are going up are doing so because the team is creating more suites and more specialty field-level seating, that makes the efforts on the other 96% of prices ring a little hollow.  The lengths the Yankees go to now to cater to the deep-pocketed, bougie baseball fans has gotten a bit tiresome and it'd be nice if they would take the hint from this past season that maybe they need to do a little more for the rest of us.  Yankee Stadium attendance was down over 9% this year, a little over 3,000 fans per game, and that decrease has just as much to do with the insane prices as it did the mediocre product on the field.  Adding more luxury seating to the stadium hardly feels like the right move given the current state of the organization, but what are you gonna do?  It's Hal's team now and he can do whatever he wants with it.

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