Mets, Yankees fans refusing to overpay

Necro · 05-31-2009, 05:51 AM

Quote:

Mets, Yankees fans refusing to overpay
Wallace Matthews -Newsday

The evidence is mounting rapidly. In the Bronx, 23 home dates and only one announced sellout, on Opening Day. In Flushing, the same number of dates, the same number of sellouts.

Through Friday, the Mets and Yankees were leading their divisions. Yet there are plenty of seats available at both new ballparks despite a winter of priceless free publicity and an endless stream of hype during each team's broadcasts.

The teams knew attendance would be down this year -- they engineered the parks to hold fewer people and rake in more money -- but still, they were designed to operate at full capacity every night, and so far, each has managed to do that. Once.

If early-season baseball attendance in New York is a referendum on just how far our teams can push their fan bases, the fans in Flushing and the Bronx have voted, and the results appear to be pretty definitive.

And next year, the precincts in East Rutherford will be counted, at which time we will learn if football fans, too, have their limit. Two months into their new eras, Yankees and Mets fans have shown they certainly have.

What will that mean for the Giants and Jets? A humiliating rollback of PSL and ticket prices, a la the Yankees? The embarrassment of having swaths of empty seats in their new stadium? A return to the medieval times of half-sold houses and blacked-out games?

Only time will tell, but judging by what's happening in the Bronx and Flushing, it could be all of the above.

OK, so neither the new Yankee Stadium nor its counterpart in Flushing can handle the capacity of their predecessors. Fine. But where are the 53,070 people who came nightly to the old Yankee Stadium in 2008, and where are the 49,902 who showed up every night in the final season of Shea Stadium?

So far, the Yankees are averaging 44,636 in their new crib, the Mets 38,806. If baseball is so popular in this town and Yankees and Mets games truly are must-see events, as both clubs insisted throughout the offseason, why aren't there 10,000 people milling around outside their ballparks every game night, trying to buy up every last ticket in the house, and the rest going home empty-handed and disappointed?

One of the reasons, of course, is simple and self-evident. It's the economy, stupid. But in a metropolitan area that certainly has more than 83,442 people - the combined average attendance at both parks - wealthy enough to buy their way into these exclusive clubs dressed as ballparks, there has to be something more to it.

It just might be that the remarkably deep-pocketed, thick-skinned and resilient sports fans of this town finally have reached their limit.

It never has been easy to be a fan, especially around here, where aside from the Yankees' transcendent five-year run in the late 1990s and the occasional Giants Super Bowl appearance, our teams have never given much return for what always has been a hefty investment.

But what they ask of you now is ridiculous and what they return is simply not enough to make it worthwhile.

Clearly, people are opting out of spending exorbitant amounts to witness baseball games in the flesh, especially when it is much more economical, not to mention fan-friendly, to simply plop down in the recliner in front of the HDTV, crack a beer, pop your own corn and not have to contend with traffic, or shell out $19 for parking and $10 for tolls, and heaven knows how much else at the concession stands.

It's simply no longer worth it, no matter how good the team is or how deeply ingrained in your DNA the ritual of going to the ballpark on a summer night really is.

The next big test, of course, comes a year from now, when the Giants and Jets roll out their new stadium, complete with PSLs, which are the stupidest investments this side of AIG stock. Early returns are encouraging: The Jets reportedly cut short their PSL auction after only 620 sales, about one-third of the number they hoped to sell, and the Giants burned through a 20-year waiting list, more than 140,000 names, in a matter of months.

I mean, nothing like "investing'' between $5,000 and $20,000 for the right to buy tickets for 10 more games, two of which don't even count, at equally outrageous prices.

It's a deal a lot of fans apparently are rejecting. But this is what happens when you run sports teams as if they were hedge funds, when you artificially inflate the value of tickets, when you create a false sense of demand for the product, when you try to bully or sucker your loyal fan base into buying something it neither needs nor wants all that much, with an eye only on grabbing a quick profit.

Even in a city this big, sooner or later, you run out of suckers.

Then the only suckers left are the teams themselves, and the people who run them.

Good read, now that's some bullshit to screw your fans like that. Charging crazy amounts of money.