The Mets put out a press release yesterday announcing they have sold 3 million tickets this year.
This is good news: if your last name is Wilpon.
Otherwise, this is not a reason to celebrate, especially if you want to see a Met game live in 2009.
There are hundreds of thousands of Met fans in that 3 million number who buy six-packs or partial season ticket plans. Some of us in Loge13 have been buying partial plans for over 20 years. And we have been told that, come 2009, we will probably not be in the new stadium unless we upgrade to a full season package.
The new stadium will hold 12,000 less fans. But it will have more luxury boxes…which real fans will probably never sit in.
Loge13 salutes the 3,000,000–plus ticket holders who will grace the turnstyles of Shea this year. Take lots of pictures. You may never get this close to a Met game again after 2008.
Full press release:
2007 Mets ticket sales surpass 3 million
FLUSHING, N.Y. -- The New York Mets today announced that they have surpassed 3,000,000 in ticket sales for the 2007 season at Shea Stadium, marking the earliest time since 1989 that the Mets have exceeded 3 million tickets sold. By comparison, the Mets reached the same benchmark last year on July 5.
To date, the Mets have had five sellouts and nine crowds in excess of 50,000.
Sales for Season Tickets and Plans for 2007 are up more than 34% from last year's same date sales. Continuing full Season Tickets holders in both 2007 and 2008 will have priority in purchasing Season Tickets at Citi Field, the Mets' new home scheduled to open in 2009.
The Mets sold 3,510,157 tickets for the 2006 regular season at Shea Stadium, including eight sellouts and 11 crowds of more than 50,000.
Comments
The seat reduction for the new mets ballpark (nevermind selling the naming rights) is a travesty that should shame the mets ownership group. I'm a lifelong mets fans, but I won't go to Citifield when it opens up. I'll listen on the radio and watch them on the road. What a joke--we (the fans) pay the bills but get nothing in return.
The new stadium is not friendly to the average fan. I don't care about the angle of my seat or how much leg room I have at the ball game. I'm there to be one of 56,000+ in the playoffs cheering at the top of my lungs making Shea's steel frame tremble along with the opponent in the batters box.
Mets fans aren't so stupid as to be brainwashed into thinking that the Ebbet's Rotunda is somehow evidence that the Wilpons have a sense of history. Instead of a naming the stadium after a hero, a great person, or a great idea, they've put a multinational corporation label on it. They will rob the average fan of being able to go to the ballpark to catch a game with his or her family in favor of turning the game into one for corporations, money, power, and the aristocracy. The language of the game has changed--ticket scarcity, the product on the field, rising concession prices, naming rights. Sure, its endemic to society as a whole, but the fans are being carefully manipulated.