That makes a lot more sense.
I’m a lot more knowledgeable about football than baseball, and I know that it’s up to a team who gets a ring in the NFL, and I was curious if it was different in the MLB, but apparently not.
(Google to the rescue, LOL.)
I don’t normally follow baseball, so it was a surprise to me that the Jays made it to the World Series. But holy cow – the ticket prices! Even assuming you can get them at face value, not inflated prices from a reseller, the best seats at Rogers Centre are over $8200 each, plus taxes and fees. The cheapest seats, way up in the nosebleed section, are over $1300. At Dodger Stadium, the best seats (in Canadian dollars) are almost $13,000, and the cheapest are $1160. That’s just insane! According to the video posted with the article, the cheapest tickets for Game 1 are currently only available on the resale market and are over $2500.
The hotel room with a field view is something like $6K is looking like a bargain.
The stadium holds WAG 30K people. WAG 30M people want to attend. It’s 1000x oversubscribed. So the richest 1/1000th get to buy the tickets.
Capitalism in the face of extreme scarcity is like that.
The way I look at it is, the rich can fund the thing I watch on TV for free.
I’m nowhere near Toronto or LA, but if someone was to give me a ticket, I’d sure get there.
As it is, I’ll have the best seat in the house. My house, that is. Plus, the beer is cheaper.
Rogers Centre currently has a baseball capacity of around 41,000; Dodger Stadium holds around 56,000. But, the point is still true: major professional sports tickets are now almost always crazy-expensive, even for regular-season games; for the postseason, it’s an order of magnitude above that. And, in the case of the World Series (or the Super Bowl), it’s often much more about corporate/sponsor guests than it is regular fans.
The same principle applies to hockey, but the whole sport operates at a more modest level. I don’t remember the cost of typical playoff tickets, but I know that my son and I went to several NHL playoff games with tickets that I paid for myself (not corporate freebies) so it clearly wasn’t some astronomical cost. And hockey arenas are smaller than baseball stadiums, so the multiplier factor on ticket revenues is less, too.
The only word for the amount of money that goes into major league baseball, including player salaries, is “obscene”. It’s a game where you try to hit a ball with a stick. Depending on how well they can throw a ball or hit it with a stick, some players are signed to like $25 million contracts. I don’t blame the players or MLB. I just think the public is insane.
I will, however, be watching the World Series and rooting for Canada’s team. I hope they’re better than the Dodgers at hitting a ball with a stick!
It’s entertainment. Hitting a stick with a ball… Why not complain about the insane prices for concert tickets? Anyone can sing. You don’t even need to be an athlete.
Or how much does an actor make? That’s just playing make-believe, which pretty much every kid learns to do on their own.
Fact of the matter is, when you are one of the best people in the entire world at doing something, there’s a chance to become filthy rich at it, if it’s interesting enough for people to want to witness you doing it.
Suppose they gave a playoff game and nobody came? Might make somebody rethink ticket prices.
This was on the news yesterday. Nosebleeds in the 500 level at Rogers Centre have a face value price of $500. But the news reported that they were being resold for $1600. Supply and demand, I guess.
All of the major sports leagues (including at the major college level) are in the same camp. The players make a crap-ton of money, because the teams rake in an even larger crap-ton of money, which is largely the product of:
- Enormous contracts for broadcast rights (TV, radio, streaming); the networks and websites know that sports are a guaranteed generator of viewers, and pay handsomely for the right to carry the games.
- Sponsorship deals (stadium naming rights, sponsor patches on uniforms, etc.).
- Merchandising deals.
Which is exactly why they make that amount of money. YOU are the product the league is selling and sales are up, baby!
This is turning into a bit of a hijack, for which I apologize. But to answer the question, it’s a matter of degree. My son and a friend attended Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” concert a couple of years ago with really good seats, but while the tickets weren’t cheap, they, like hockey playoff tickets, were still affordable and not crazy insanely expensive! They sure as hell weren’t $8000 apiece!
But enough about this. I’m not here to disparage baseball. I don’t usually follow it, but when the Jays are doing well in the post-season, I’m happy to watch!
I hope that you will indulge a slight hijack.
I was a huge Laker fan my whole life and I lived maybe a fifteen minute drive (light traffic) to the Forum where they played at the time. I was 18 in 1982 and the Lakers were in the Finals. They won it all in 1980 and had an early exit in 1981.
Game 6 was at home and the Lakers led 3-2 against the Sixers. Magic and Kareem won it all against Dr J that night. I got a ticket from a scalper at storefront shop on the day of the game. It was at half court about three quarters of the way up from the court a few rows below the press box. I paid $35 ($117 in 2025 dollars). That was about what I made working for a full day at a pizza restaurant before taxes.
Cheap seats for the regular season were $7.00 and if you had a student ID it was half price day of the game and sell outs were rare. You could almost always sneak down to a better seat. I sat courtside one time because someone didn’t show up.
I took my wife to the same concert (in the Tacoma Dome though) as an anniversary present. It was an amazing show!
And you’re right that it was a lot more affordable. I think that things like the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals, that uniqueness drives up the price like a high quality diamond that is valuable simply because it’s sparkly and rare. While a concert might be one of dozens in a tour, and doesn’t garner nearly as much attention and importance. Those sports marketers work extremely hard to make people believe in the event. You also have the advantage of fans watching a team strive to get to that spot in a competitive fashion, and become invested emotionally in it. There is a lot that goes into a sports championship that you just can’t equate to nearly any other event.
Back to baseball…
Dodgers reliever Alex Versia is out for an undetermined amount of time for a “deeply personal family matter”. His wife is fairly far along in a pregnancy so possibly related to that which would be horrible news.
Could you imagine, you make it all the way to the World Series, and in what could be one of the most important and potentially thrilling moments of your career and life, you have a personal issue that takes you out of it? And then, if this is a case where you lose a pregnancy (which it sounds like this could be), that’s awful. Talk about going from the highest high to lowest low all of a sudden.
I read on reddit that you could have him on the roster and then with the MLB’s permission give him a three day bereavement/paternity leave (which they certainly would). He could be replaced on the roster and then swap back into his spot.
The Sporting News Player of the Year award, first started in 1936, is voted on by the players themselves.
That’s pretty cool that the other players recognize his value.