YANKEE FANS, IT SEEMS, can't win for winning.
According to The New York Times, the New York Yankees are aggressively punishing season ticket holders who resell their tickets through online sites such as StubHub or eBay. Yankee officials are trawling these sites looking for offers. If the officials can determine who's doing the selling based on where the seats are, the subscribers who try to unload tickets for a single game lose all their tickets for the season.
This policy will, if enforced rigorously enough, primarily alienate long-term fans. People who buy tickets on a one-off basis — without having a relationship with the Yankees — and then resell them online effectively walk away without punishment.
So who suffers most? The fans who have been with the team longest. At Yankee Stadium, preferential seats are allotted to fans based on how long they've held tickets. People whose seats a generation ago were located near the outfield have slowly migrated toward home plate. Longtime ticket holders who lose seats because of this policy are shunted all the way back to the nosebleed seats in the outfield. That's some way to reward loyalty.
Now, it's not that the Yankees have an objection to reselling tickets. Quite the contrary: Again, according to the Times, the team is creating “Pinstripe Marketplace” — a Web source that will enable fans to sell their unwanted ducats.
So why is this site different from all others? Well, unlike StubHub or eBay, Pinstripe Marketplace would effectively give the Yankees two bites at the apple — they'll make money on the initial sale of tickets, and again when they're resold.
Incongruously, Yankee radio broadcasts carry ads for StubHub. OK, it's probably true that the Yankees themselves don't have too much control over who books commercial time during its radio broadcasts. But some of the StubHub ads are read by Yankees' play-by-play announcer John Sterling. By allowing the radio voice of the Yankees — who is paid by the team's network — to read an ad for StubHub, the organization relinquishes a bit of its moral high ground.
Finally, it's not as if the Yankees have unsold inventory that's going to waste. Announcer Sterling has noted several times during the current season that the team could have sold out every game in advance, had it not elected to hold back a few thousand tickets for day-of-game sales. As it happens, the team will set an attendance record this year.
It's pretty obvious this is a poorly thought-out policy: In the Times' article, an official with the San Diego Padres notes that his team is aware of 36,000 tickets that have been resold this season, against his team's policy. But he acknowledges that taking any action would not help fan relations.
Now, I do have something of a personal tie in this: I was part of a group that held tickets to Yankee games, but I gave 'em up after the 2003 season, when the team let lefthanded pitcher Andy Pettitte walk. As it happened, our group was large enough that unwanted seats were rarely an issue.
So here's my fearless prediction: At some point, either the Yankees are going to back off this inflexible policy, or some law firm that's had its seats yanked is going to challenge this policy in court, which will result in a lot more ugly publicity than the team had bargained for. And for what? A chance to make a second profit on something the club had already — assumedly — sold at a fair price the first time around?
Gentlemen, we cry foul.
