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Who says the Fenway sellout streak is dead?
By adamg on Mon, 05/14/2012 - 12:12am
Sure, you've got your doubting Thomases, but ESPN is not among them. In fact, ESPN reports the Mother's Day game had one of the highest attendance records for any sporting event ever, in the history of the world.
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Comments
Had me going there
I thought for a second I was going to have to point out that soccer stadiums in Europe can hold over 80,000 people like Real Madrid's home field. Then I clicked the link. Looks like someone double typed one of the 6's or one of the 1's.
Probably one of the 1's.
Fenway's maximum seating is 37,493, so with standing room and whatnot included, 37,600 sounds right.
sellout always was a fake
The "sellout" streak always was a fake. They could claim they were sold out because Ace Tickets had bought them up, but we don't know how often Ace was left stuck with tickets. I remember several games where there were large numbers of empty seats visible in the middle of the game.
Where to begin...
Ace Tickets paid for all of the tickets they resold (or didn't resell). So, to Fenway, it's still a sellout regardless of whether there's a butt in the seat or not. If I don't go to one of the games in my partial season plan because I'm sick, the sellout streak isn't suddenly in jeopardy. In fact, in the previously linked article, the head of Ace Tickets said the rumor that he was buying all of the unsold last minute tickets just to keep the streak alive is absurd. He's running a business. If Fenway has unsold tickets, then more than likely Ace does too. He'd go out of business in a week if he was "helping them" by putting their unsold tickets on his bottom line!
As far as empty seats visible in the middle of games...check the beer lines. If it's a cold day, check the Dunks line. If the Sox are down by 10 runs, check the parking lots.
Yes, if Ace has unsold
Yes, if Ace has unsold tickets, it is still *technically* a sellout, but I don't think that actually counts. It is different than a season ticket, since there is not a person attached to the ticket intending (at least minimally) to go. And it doesn't require Ace trying to keep the streak, just doing business as usual - and then finding that, no, there aren't people who actually want to be in every one of those seats. If large ticket sellers didn't exist, I find it hard to believe the streak would have lasted as long.
Sure it does
Cause Ace rarely takes a loss on it.
I honestly think you could only argue it wasn't sold out if resale value was below Fenway MSRP. Even when Ace and scalpers leave tickets on the table, they're still adding and making a nice premium on Fenways sale values.
Which is one of my pet peeves. They're middle men that serve no purpose but to inflate prices and act as gatekeepers.
I'd much rather Fenway charge more, and outlaw resells (both making it harder for the vendors) than selling them dirt cheap and having some 3rd party buy them up.
Fenway charge more?
Don't they already have the most expensive tickets in baseball?
I guess I don't mind the resellers, since I'm going today with tickets that cost me 1/4th of face value.
Even at below face value
I still can't bring myself to buy from a scalper, for the reasons listed above. They've done nothing but spend the last few years making it damn near impossible to get tickets for anything, and given a choice between giving them something back and making them eat the cost, I'll at least pass the salt.
So your view is that the streak indicates incompetent brokers?
Come on, that's ridiculous! How could Ace stay in business if they consistently failed to sell a significant portion of the tickets they've acquired. If the sellouts were truly a mirage, Ace would have gone out of business long ago.
significant portion is not the same as "All"
I'm sure Ace is quite efficient, and manages to make plenty of money. But if they manage to move 95% of their tickets, than 5% didn't get sold. If you sell "almost all" of your tickets, you don't have a sellout.
I wouldn't even notice this if it wasn't that such a big deal gets made over the sellout streak.
Except...
Ace bought the tickets from the Red Sox. The Red Sox sold all of their tickets in that regard. Whether Ace uses them themselves or sells them to someone one else is immaterial to the Red Sox.
I actually own 3 of those partial season tickets. I used to go to the games with 2 friends who bought the other two seats from me every year. They moved out of town and now my roommate buys one of the two seats from me. Every game, I try to find a third person who wants to go to the game with us. On particularly bad weather games, I have a lot of trouble finding someone who wants to go sit in Fenway to watch them play someone like the A's or Twins. On one or two occasions in the past year or two, I've been unable to find someone to go with us or the person has backed out.
Does that alone invalidate the sellout streak by your measure? I bought the ticket in December with no one in mind to use it. I tried to find friends who wanted to sit in a cold rain in April to watch a non-divisional game and couldn't. I imagine Ace Tickets has a hard time for those game days too.
My point is that the Red Sox sell tickets. If they sell them all to a buyer, then it's a sellout. Ace Tickets is a buyer. Whatever they choose to do with the tickets afterwards is up to them and none of the Red Sox concern as to whether the Red Sox sold the ticket or not, which is all the sellout should involve. The legitimate complaints are surrounding tickets like those reserved for charities. They're donated, not "sold". That means that if they reserve 100 tickets for charity for a game, and the charity returns them unused, then did they still "sellout" the stadium that night? Their argument (and the one everyone else in the industry goes by) is that they also "sell" places to stand around the stadium in excess of any returned donation tickets, thus they still have sold out if they sell access to more people than the seating capacity.
PS - If you know anyone who works for the Red Sox, they can buy at least 2 of those returned tickets per game at half off the normal price.
Season ticket liquidity
I was under the impression that there are lots of folks in Kaz's situation and many of them turn to resellers to unload unused individual game tickets, for a fee. It's a bit nicer to go to an online "reputable" vendor than to find some guy in the street willing to buy. This is the role a broker plays: an intermediary with better access to the market than you have time or willingness to achieve. I don't think there's anything wrong, morally or legally, with this kind of service.
I would distinguish that from the practice of "cornering the market" on tickets and then using that monopoly power to pump up profits, which is morally wrong and of questionable legality.