New York Yankees Changing Ticket Policy

The Yankees have announced a change to their ticketing policy. From now on, you will no longer be able to print your tickets at home; instead, you will either receive "hard stock" physical tickets, or get mobile tickets sent to your smartphone.

The team says this is an effort to prevent counterfeiting of tickets, since it's very easy to fake or alter the print-at-home PDFs. My issue is that this really doesn't do anything to prevent fraud. If you want the team to send you tickets in the mail, you better have enough time to wait for delivery - no more deciding to head up to the stadium for a game on a random weekend. I also might just have a cynical view, but what will prevent someone from buying a ticket, sending it to their mobile device, taking a screencap of the ticket, and either (a) selling me the ticket but arriving at the stadium before me and scanning the ticket for themselves or (b) sending me a screencap that might not be accurately read by the ticket scanner.

What this really comes down to is the fact that the Yankees don't have an official deal with StubHub, instead working only with Ticketmaster. With StubHub, sellers can sell a ticket for any price they want, face value, inflated prices, or one dollar. Ticketmaster, however, has a set price floor to prevent people from selling tickets at less than face value.

Here's the scenario that screws the fan:  You have some vacation days to burn during the summer, and decide to take in a Thursday afternoon game in the Bronx. Tickets are cheaper on StubHub, but selling for face on Ticketmaster, which will deliver an electronic ticket to your phone. You won't be able get in with a PDF ticket, so unless you can get the StubHub seller’s physical tickets in your hands within a few hours, you’re stuck paying full price on Ticketmaster.

The Yankees COO Lonn Trost has already come out to defend the new policy with one strange and one snobby statement.

The strange:

The problem below market at a certain point is that if you buy a ticket in a very premium location and pay a substantial amount of money. It’s not that we don’t want that fan to sell it, but that fan is sitting there having paid a substantial amount of money for a ticket and [another] fan picks it up for a buck-and-a-half and sits there, and it’s frustrating to the purchaser of the full amount.”

The snobby:

And quite frankly, the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.”

The first is a strange comment simply because at none of the Yankee games I've ever attended have I ever discussed ticket price with the fans around me. If everyone was required to wear a tag that said "I paid $200" and end up sitting next to a guy who says "I paid $20" then sure, that would be annoying. That won't happen, so how would we know the price anyone else paid?

The second statement shows the borderline elitist attitude from the Yankee front office. The premium seats are only for a certain 'class' of people? Heaven forfend that one of the plebians from the bleacher seats manage to get a good deal on field level seats.

I am a Yankee fan, I've always been and always will be. Nothing will keep me from being a fan of the game, but the business side of baseball is just getting worse and worse.