Yesterday, Newsday wrote an excellent piece on Citi Field and the disenfranchisement of current Met partial season ticket holders.
There was some decent feedback on the piece, mostly along the lines of:
- Shea is an eyesore anyway. I’d rather see games in the new stadium.
- The Mets don’t sell out now so having less seats doesn’t matter.
- Quit grousing. This is the price of progress.
The first two points miss the point. Whether you like or dislike Shea, the new stadium is being priced so that the average fan will have less opportunities to see games. There are 13,000 less seats in total and more luxury boxes. Getting into Citi Field will be only slightly easier than getting into a NY Jets playoff game.
The second point is just wrong. The Mets have been setting attendance records the past two years. Over 200,000 people went to last weekend’s Red/Mets series, setting a franchise record for largest crowd at a 4 game series. And that was the Reds! Demand is not down, as anyone who actually goes to the game can attest.
We’re very mindful of the last point. And strive in this blog to praise Shea-sar, not bury it (apologies Bill S). Whiny, indignant posts aren’t very interesting so we (mostly) avoid them. But it’s important to point out when a corporation errs in a policy, as the Mets are doing now. This post from umpbump.com sizes up the issue very well. An excerpt:
I know that it seems like I and people like Goldman are dramatizing the issue. But do consider the fact that so far in 2007, the Mets have averaged over 44,000 fans per game, which is already 2,000 more people than Citi Field will accommodate. When the new stadium opens, the interest generated by the novelty will create a tougher competition for the tickets themselves. The Mets can hike up the price of tickets quite a bit before they will find a lack of interested parties. As if that were not enough, NY State legislature has made scalping legal, which will no doubt exacerbate the issue.
I am not so naive as to make this out to be armageddon, or to paint devil horns on owner Fred Wilpon’s picture whenever I see it. I understand that this is a business and that in this multimedia age, there are many options out there where I can continue to follow my team even if I may not be able to attend the games as often as I would like. The Mets have a business plan to increase revenue, which I’d like to think will improve the quality of players on the field.
Comments
People are jumping to way too many conclusions and making to many incorrect statements.
The Mets are a for-profit business, I do not blame them one bit for telling people that partial season holders are SOL. Why not try to get people to commit for the full season? Sell as much product as possible, I don't blame them one bit.
But the reality is that there will almost absolutely be partial season plans. For one thing, it would be a public relations fiasco.
But all you need to do is look crosstown to the Yankees to understand that there will be partial season tickets. The Yanks have been drawing over 4 million fans (50,000+ a night) over the last few seasons and they offer partial plans and have tickets available to the public. In fact they even sell discounted tickets in plans and as singles.
I bought a plan in May from them that gave me tickets for 2 Subway Series games at regular and 3 "non-premium" games AT HALF PRICE.
Those 3 games were all weekend or holiday games in pretty good locations and I immediately sold them on Ebay for face value or better (thus paying for my Mets Subway Series tix).
Now if the Yanks have to resuort to partial seasons and ticket discounts, plus have tickets available for all games for the public to buy on a regular basis...why wouldn't the Mets?
My prediction is that the Mets aren't going announce partial plans until the winter before the ballpark opens, so as to sell as many full seasons as possible....but they will sel partial plans. They will piss off too many people if they don't.
I don't understand why people are coming down on the Mets when you have the Jets and Giants who never sell tickets to the public and have enormous waiting lists for tickets.
Going to a Mets game, like the Giants or Jets is not a g-d given right.
In full diclosure, I upgraded from a Saturday plan to a full season this season. My friend and I probably go to about half the games between the 2 of us and we sell off the rest to people with have found on Craigslist. I always ended up going to more games (20-25) than just Sat, so this made sense to me...plus we get full playoff rights.