Jon Greenberg
12/07/2009 6:53 AM
The Winter Meetings begin in earnest Monday in Indianapolis, a far more conservative locale than last year's Las Vegas convention.
Money continues to be on the forefront of all major baseball news, from teams trying to shed salaries (the Cubs and Milton Bradley) to teams adding revenue through rising ticket prices (Cubs again) to teams trying to prove they're not making any money (the Pirates this time, who let the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette take a look at their books; see Hitting the Links), not to mention the teams that will be signing free agents through lobby conversations and private hotel room dealings.
I want to focus a little on the Cubs, only because they announced new ticket increases for 2010 under new ownership, the Ricketts family. When the new group was formally announced at Wrigley Field last month, I was in attendance as the managing partner, Tom Ricketts, admitted openly that prices were going to increase.
Anyone with half-a-brain could figure price increases would be forthcoming with the Ricketts family paying approximately $850 million to buy the team.
According to an early review of the numbers, Team Marketing Report figures the Cubs' average ticket price will increase from $47.75 to about $52.57, a 10.1 percent increase that matches last season's 10 percent jump.
As the Cubs continued to spend more and more money, ticket prices have risen accordingly, or dramatically if you're a season ticket holder, in recent years.
Ticket prices are up across the board, from a nearly $10 increase per ticket for club box infield seats ($96.23), the really good ones, to 92 cents for upper deck reserved outfield seats ($19.72), the really bad ones.
The Cubs are one of a handful of teams that have different price levels for season tickets, four in all. This year they changed the numbers rather dramatically. Instead of a 5-28-34-14 breakdown, from cheapest to most expensive, it is now 6-19-30-26, with 12 more platinum (i.e. most expensive) dates.
The Cubs also changed the way ticket prices are presented this year, breaking out the amusement tax separately. Chicago's amusement tax is going up from 11 to 12 percent for 2010.
Cubs president Crane Kenney, a Tribune Co. holdover, told the Chicago Tribune that 25 percent of platinum tickets are sold through baseball's official ticket reseller StubHub, which accounts for the price increases in those seats. (See the full story here.)
"We understand our season ticket holders in particular use the secondary market as a way of underwriting their ticket purchases," Kenney told the Tribune's long-time Cubs beat writer, Paul Sullivan. "It's a fact of life. We're over that. That's fine. So we did the $5 (average) increase on those premium games as a way of trying to push the burden of our ticket price increase on those games, leaving the ticket prices flat for most of our games, for most of our seats."
In reality, this move was a no-brainer, as the Cubs focused much of the increases on expensive seats and kept some seats affordable.
But as with any ticket increase, this one figures to be largely unpopular, and placing the blame on the secondary market (especially for a team that set up its own secondary outlet and got sued by its fans), it will engender more ill will.
At least one season ticket holder disputed Kenney's reasoning, noting, in an e-mail to TMR, that the Cubs' recent late-season fade affected their ability to re-sell tickets at any value.
"What about the September games?" the ticket holder wrote to TMR. "I literally could not give my tickets away for free! Seriously. I posted them for free on my Facebook page--to about 500 friends and no one really wanted them. And that makes them think that they can raise the prices by an average of almost 8 percent per game?"
I know this is true, as several friends of mine tried giving away September seats to no avail.
The ticket holder's combination 54-game plan (down one game from 2009) was supposedly unchanged, but in actuality, the seats went up 7.86 percent, from $34.73 to $37.46 per game, and the price of platinum tickets, before the amusement tax, went up about 5 percent, from one year to the next, from $40.05 to $42.
To Kenney's credit, he notes these changes will be unpopular in his letter to season ticket holders, but deemed them necessary. |
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