Man, I know this isn’t news but I just experienced it first hand. Â Seems all my kids want to go to the opener, so I decided to try and get 4 tickets together. Â I even decided that maybe I would spend some bucks and get “good seats.”
First the sticker shock (!) Â which quickly made me retreat to $27 promenade reserves….but then I clicked and was offered 4 “Metropolitan Box Bronze” seats. Â $203 + fees = $860. Â Eight Sixty. Â Really? Â $860? Â You expect me to take a family of 4 to a game for $860???? Â Really?
Gotta tell you, when you show me ticket options and start with $460 then $450 and the 13th cheapest option is still $203 and it takes until the 22nd cheapest option to get to $98 my reaction is to tell you to go hose yourself.
Pay attention…there are 21 ticket options above $100 and 13 over $200. Â Family of 4: over $400 before you eat or park.
I understand it’s a business. Â I hope they can get the prices they’re charging.
I bought zero. Â Who the heck is paying these prices?
(I have two already as part of my 6-pack, was trying to get 4 together for the family).
I was able to get 2 together in the Right Field Reserve section 101 for $70 a piece and 3 together in the Left Field Landing section 339 for $56 a piece.
I would play around with the system because the first level I selected which was probably promenade infield reserve brought me to ridiculously priced tickets. After playing around and searching different sections I was able to get pretty good seats for under $100 a piece. 4 together may end up being tougher though.
This just proves that teams need to adopt a stubhub style of showing you the tickets available and prices on a seating chart. The only problem is I don’t think the teams want you to see how much they actually have available.
I agree with bpalm here, where we should be able to get a sense of which sections have seats, or maybe search “only in the checked sections” or maybe the system should give us 4-5 different ticket options to choose from off the bat.
Yeah, tickets are expensive, and those metro box seats are cheaper than last year, when they sold pretty much everything except those midrange ceaser’s gold, metro box types seats. The Platinum-Opener prices are expensive, and the silver-bronze due come down to almost more reasonable prices.
And that’s why my biggest complaint with the park has always been the capacity. It’s not that th ey took out 12k seats, it’s that they took out 12k affordable seats, and also raised the price on what would be Loge/Mezzanine seats that while weren’t cheap, were at least within range of affordability.
But they do sell them, so I don’t really know what to do besides get used to it, learn the affordable sections, and do what I can. (and buy lottery tickets) I mentioned this via the 4-packs. From when they went on sale to yesterday, the tickets I could find ballooned from $300 to $1800 for a set of 4. so _someone_ is buying them.
If I’m not mistaken, when I first started going to games in the early 80’s the difference in price between the best seats in the house and the worst was about 10-15 bucks or so.
Now, the difference is 300-400 dollars!
I rarely sat down low at Shea, but from time to time I would splurge and get field box or loge box. Now, there’s no way I’m paying those prices to sit in comparable seats… I need to pay rent too!
To be fair, I should say I do like the Upper Reserved Infield seats a lot, and I think the prices are pretty fair for those. I just wish the prices didn’t jump so dramatically as you go lower in the infield.
But like Ceetar said, if people are buying the pricier seats, so be it.
I’ll be happy in the Upper Infield!
Upper Infield is by far the best value in the park. I can’t justify $98 for Outfield Caesars Club, so $400 before I get a $5 hot dog and pay my $19 for parking. Anyway, my suggestion if you really need the extra tickets for your kids is to call the ticket office and get 2 more 6-packs for $122 (less than most “good” seats), see if they can put you close to your original seats or move them all together, and then you have 4 tickets to the Opener and 5 more games. Maybe Dave Howard can have one of those tickets to Nationals game and sit in LF with you.
i really wish Dave would do the game with me. Would be awesome. Seriously, he’d probably come across looking good. I may be annoying but I don’t do hatchet jobs.
Opening Day really isn’t the best choice for an affordable family outing.
I wish the Mets had kept more affordable seats at CitiField, but even with their prices I expect them to mostly sell out Opening Day.
I’ll be very interested to see how full the place looks during the first weekend series against the Nationals, though.
I’ll splurge this year at one point, but it’ll be on a Value/Bronze game where I can sit Ceaser’s Club (I’ve been wanting to see that section during a real game) for closer to $60 or less.
Unfortunately Eric, it’s not even just the park that raised prices, as Shea was really expensive in ’07 and ’08. No MLB team had a total payroll approaching $100 million until the Yankees at the end of the century. Teams are spending 2-3 times as much just on players, never mind things like increasing property/rent costs, labor, etc.
I posted a picture on my blog a couple of weeks ago that showed the different in prices in 1974. Craziness. I should go enter those into an inflation calculator and see what it comes up with.
Sorta related to the increasing cost of baseball, if you adjusted Babe Ruth’s richest contract (when it was far more than anyone elses) to modern day standards he’d be the least paid guy in the majors.
ceetar can you send the link, that sounds pretty interesting.
This is why I normally stick to the upper deck unless someone else is footing the bill.
Thank god for vendor seats.
The cheapest seat in 1974, $2.50, would be $10.74 today. (or pretty close to the $11 for Value games we’ve got)
However, the most expensive seat, $4.00, would be merely $17 today.
I agree with a few of the commenters above. You should go for Upper Infield. I juts bought four games and didn’t spend over $30 a seat. One of those four games, I was able to get SIX seats together.
As far as views go, I sat in the 48-60 dollar a seat right field reserved twice last year. I also sat in the Pepsi Porch (also right field). It was fun being smack in the middle of home run territory (something Shea’s design never really had)
I think sitting in the Upper Infield will be a better view of the game even though I’m not field level. Plus since the stadium is open air, you can walk down to the field level and stand and watch the game if you want to get closer to the action. (Not an option with the family there I understand, but an acceptable option for us in our mid 20’s.)
There are plenty of cheaper options out there, you just have to know where the values are. And if you’re like me and would rather delegate that task, call the ticket office and they will be happy to help you find exactly what you’re looking for. Yesterday, I posted a story about how they looked through each section in Upper Infield looking for 6 seats together for me. What I didn’t mention? The time it took was literally 3 minutes.
Promenade Infield seems to be the preferred seat of us regular folks. Also seems to be the first seats that go.
Buying Mets tickets has gone beyond ridiculous. I heard about a plan advertised on the Atlanta Braves broadcast today. It’s a flex plan where YOU choose the games (it’s a 10 game pack), and they DISCOUNT the tickets (the more premium games, the bigger the discount – imagine that). And they let you change games if your schedule changes.
http://atlanta.braves.mlb.com/atl/ticketing/flex.jsp
Atlanta is interesting. Don’t forget they ran off a great decade and still couldn’t sell out a playoff game. I’m sure if the Mets run off 10 straight divisions it will be a tough ticket.
dyhrdmet: That Braves plan is further prove that Mets sales are not as bad as some people have rumored.
Wow, looking at the Braves site makes my head spin. You can get full season tickets for the Braves starting at $249 for the Upper Pavilion!
The most expensive single game tickets are $78!
Of course, the downside to all this is you’d be a Braves fan.
$249 wow! I think the Braves might actually have a team, and I am intrigued by these Nationals.
I agree. I never understood Braves fans not going to games. If the Mets did what they did, we’d be begging for pre-sale!
And the Infield Res. seats are definitely the first to go. I waited until close to game-day to buy my tickets last season and could never get a seat in the Infield Res.