Posted on by Shannon Shark @metspolice

Guest post: are teams holding back tickets for Stubhub dumping?

A guest post from Scott:

Are sports teams entering  the secondary ticket market?

Places like Ticketmaster, through the events they sell have indirectly been getting involved in the secondary ticket market for some time now.  With their VIP options, and “auctions” just being a glorified way of directly scalping tickets to consumers, could sports teams also already be involved in a similar practice?

It’s strange to look at the Yankees and Mets ticket sales and watch how on stubhub, there can be blocks of tickets for premium games to which group tickets were supposedly not sold.  On the other end, with tickets selling for pennies on the dollar, are the teams directly involved in this practice?

Is MLB possibly in cahoots with Stubhub and reaping a significant portion of the fees and shipping charges to off set directly selling tickets that wouldn’t move otherwise for such a low price?   If this is happening, wouldn’t it be a serious conflict of interest?

More recently, is it possible the Mets are holding back single game cheap seats to the Yankees series in order to generate the perception of these tickets being sold out and forcing the unknowing customer into an up-sell?  The ticket world could be going down a very slippery slope and ironically, it may be because of the teams and not the typical talking point, the scalpers.

I don’t know what goes on or doesn’t, but I will tell some personal anecdotes.

Just this week I heard this story: A friend of mine is going to Chicago this summer and bought some tickets on Stubhub.  A few minutes later he got a thank you email from the Cubs.  That was nice of them.

This morning MLB emailed many fans including me to let us know we could buy tickets to the Yankees or Phillies series on Stubhub.

I decided to see if there were any tickets available through Mets.com for Tuesday’s game.  Yep – I can get myself some $19 seats.

I’m not smart enough to know what motivated MLB to send such an email today.  Perhaps there are some bargains on Stubhub they wanted me to know about.  I could right now get two for Tuesday from Stubhub for $18, which is less than the face – I’m not sure how it shakes out once fees are compared.

So, thanks MLB for letting me know I can potentially save a buck.  That must be it.

16 Replies to “Guest post: are teams holding back tickets for Stubhub dumping?”

  1. Businesses sell extra inventory through secondary channels all the time.

    You can buy the same Ralph Lauren shirt in Macy’s for full price as you can in a PL outlet store for 20% less or in a store like Filene’s or Century 21 for 33% less.

    Why should a baseball team look to sell extra inventory ata discount?

  3. The Mets have been doing this for sometime. I bought a ticket for the last game at Shea and got an e-mail from them two days later.

  4. bought tickets for a Red Sox game at Fenway through StubHub. My thought was mainly Fenway is always sold out. I now get e-mails from the Red Sox for every promotion they do similar to all the e-mails I get from the mets

  5. Had my Porch tickets listed on Stubhub for the Saturday Met / Yankee game. Checked this morning to see what was left on Stubhub and how it looked for getting my price. Out of nowhere nearly 100 tickets appeared in Section 305, Rows 3 through 8, that hadn’t been listed previously. ENTIRE ROWS were listed. My first thought was, “The box office is dumping”. Fortunately, they (if it was them) weren’t offering them at sale prices, but had them listed for about the market Stubhub price. So no real harm, right? Well….the way any marketplace works, is when something is scarce, the price goes up. Entire rows showing up at the last minute eliminate the possibility of scarcity driving up the price. The predictable thing happened. I lowered my price. Thanks Mets.

  7. The MLB and Stubhub have a multi-million dollar deal that named Stubhub as their official secondary ticket re-seller. They have an option for Season Ticket Holders to transfer their tickets to the exchange to re-sell them. That’s a more likely reason why you’re seeing an influx of tickets to certain games on SH, it’s highly unlikely that the team is actually moving unsold inventory there themselves.

  8. While it is certainly true that teams (and bands) sell tickets in the secondary markets to events–there have been a number of articles about this over the past year, Google it–the marketing emails are most likely because StubHub is selling buyer’s email address to the team for marketing purposes. This is not limited to Stubhub…I have found myself on team’s and band’s mailing lists after buying tickets from Ticketmaster before. In fact, I doubt the emails discussed in this post are any evidence at all because a seller on Stubhub does not get the buyer’s email address. But yeah, it is pretty known that the teams and bands do sell directly to the secondary market.

  9. Seems like the Mets hold sec 515 for potential ticket plan sales they are not avaiable for single game sales then as it gets closer to game day they release to stubhub never allowing fans to buy at face

      1. This is definitely the case, and has always been the case. The Mets hold back their plans sales, blocked out, and then release them if/when they don’t sell. It’s not a conspiracy. They did it at Shea, and they do it now. It helps elminate random single seats getting lost in the mix too.

        I don’t think they have any set date for releasing seats, or if they release small blocks at a time based on projects of sales, but probably monitoring the 6-pack availability and seeing it disappear off the website is one method.

  10. My bigger question in relation to this was in regards to whether they release the seats on stubhub to say the subway series at inflated premium prices beyond the published face value. Dumping tickets is one thing, however I can’t think it’s legal for the original vendor to sell the tickets on the secondary market at a premium.

  11. They release some seats for the next homestand after last game is done on current homestand

  12. I’ve been saying this for a while now, and a lot of professional brokers have tipped me off to the practice. If the teams want variable pricing, why don’t they just come out and do it honestly? I hate this shady stuff.

  13. I have no idea why or how but I snagged a pair of tickets in section 339 for the 5/21 subway series game for $9 per ticket on Stubhub. I’m thinking it was a typo, supposed to be $90???

  14. There is no doubt that MLB is holding tickets back for high demand games and they release them on Stub Hub strategically to keep the supply low and the price high. I have been watching this for the Rangers-Yankees playoff series and the supply will slowly increase and then on the last day or two they will dump a lot of tickets at prices that are around $15 higher than face value for the worst seats in the house. More than 10% of the entire seating for a game is on sell a few days before the event? I don’t think 40 people from one crappy upper deck section decide at the last minute that they won’t attend a playoff game or decide to sell their tickets for a loss. Also as mentioned in an above post, MLB sends an email to let you know that you can buy tickets on StubHub several days before the event. Why would they do this unless they are making more money on it? This article from Smart Money claims that MLB makes 25% of the premium from Stub Hub. If they allowed the game to sell out by actual people purchasing these seats first, then I would have no problem with Stub Hub, but MLB is absolutely screwing the fans by taking this approach.

    http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/rip-offs/10-things-major-league-baseball-wont-tell-you-21894/?page=2

Comments are closed.