NY Baseball teams have trouble selling expensive seats

Ken Belson / NY Times offers a bleak picture of the new ballparks in NY. There are just tons of empty seats near homeplate because the tickets are just too damn expensive and remain unsold. The kicker is that many fans are getting rid of their tickets online for below face value. Ouch!

Unable to sell season-ticket plans for about 100 of their best seats, the Mets have been auctioning them off one game at a time. At least one fan took the bait, paying $7,500 for two seats behind home plate on opening night.

The Mets have suffered the indignity of watching a court-appointed trustee sell the two season tickets bought by Bernard L. Madoff, the financier who admitted to running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that counted the team’s principal owner, Fred Wilpon, as one of its victims.

An auction for the seats concluded on eBay Tuesday night, with the winning bid coming in at $38,100, considerably below their face value.

Neither team seemed worried that some of the premium seats — any seat that comes with an amenity, like waiter service or access to a dining club — were unfilled. Some of them could have owners who simply did not show up, which hurts food, parking and merchandise sales. Other seats may be part of partial season ticket plans that did not include games played last week.

“If someone’s not there at the moment, that doesn’t mean it’s unsold,” said Dave Howard, the vice president for operations for the Mets. So far, he said, fans are spending about 60 percent more on food, beverages and merchandise than they did at Shea Stadium. “There’s a lot of circulation in the ballpark.”

Many fans with tickets are trying to recoup what they can by selling some of them online well below face value. More than 10,000 tickets (about 20 percent of the ballpark) for the Yankees’ game against the Oakland Athletics on Wednesday were available, a handful for as little as $5, according to FanSnap.com, which scans the Web sites of five dozen ticket resellers.

If I were the Mets and Yankees, I would immediately lower the prices on these tickets and refund money to all season ticket holders to make up the difference. If they lose revenue, at least they got fannies in the seats. It's an awful sight to see seas of empty seats at a brand new stadium.