The Yankees average over 37,000 a game, yet get stuff written about how they are having attendance issues. If you’re savvy and go to the secondary market, you can still get tickets for a relatively decent price to most Yankees games, even if they’re not the best seats in the world. Compare this to basketball or football tickets for elite and/or popular teams and it actually is quite a bargain.
Yet I’ve seen Hal Steinbrenner take a lot of flak for this over the past couple of days. From Andrew Marchand’s latest:Hal Steinbrenner spoke at Yankee Stadium on Saturday. He disagreed with the assessment that tickets are overpriced in the Bronx. This is different point of view than what I generally hear from fans. This is what Hal had to say about ticket prices being too high:
“You hear about that in the media,” Steinbrenner said. “You don’t hear that there are thousands and thousands of affordable seats in the $25 range for every game, not to mention the specials that we do, that we used to do at the old stadium. We have done every year. It is nothing new. We want to make sure that everyone that comes out here to see a Yankee game can get here and see one. There are plenty opportunities.”
People complain about high ticket prices all the time, but Steinbrenner is right about there being relatively affordable tickets floating around. People complain about a lot of things. But, at the risk of sounding like a flack for the Yankees or Major League Baseball, games are more affordable than a lot of other sports and entertainment options, even if the bleacher seats ain’t two bits like they used to be. And while it is troubling that working class people are being priced out of games, people in general are still coming in pretty big numbers.
I guess this happens, though, when you set expectations so high for so many years and get the reputation of being luxury goods compared to the rest of baseball.
