Back in February, Yankees COO Lonn Trost put his foot in his mouth by effectively saying the Yankees don't want a certain kind of fan sitting in the premium Legends seats at Yankee Stadium. Here's a refresher, in case you missed it:
“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. 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.”
Yeesh. Telling a rather large portion of your fan base they're not good enough to sit in the high-end seats is pretty gross. That didn't go over too well, understandably.
In an effort to keep undesirables out of premium seats going forward, the Yankees discontinued the print-at-home ticket option this year. You need either hard stock tickets or a mobile bar code to get into Yankee Stadium now. That makes buying and selling tickets with secondary market options like StubHub very difficult.
Sunday night, HBO's John Oliver, who is one of the funniest men alive when he really digs into something, tore the Yankees a new one during a segment on his show Last Week Tonight. As an added bonus, Oliver is giving away six premium tickets (two for each game this week) at what he calls the "elitist" Yankee Stadium for only 25 cents each.
The catch? You have to dress "like you never sat in a premium location before. What that means is up to you." To win the right to buy the tickets, you have to tweet a photo of yourself dressed like an undesirable to @lastweektonight with the hashtag #IHAVENEVERSATINAPREMIUMLOCATION. Let's review some submissions, shall we?
@LastWeekTonight #IHaveNeverSatInAPremiumLocation 4/6 help me ruin their night. pic.twitter.com/fz3BH0luiU
— NYCFCSUPERFAN (@NYCFCFANMAN) April 4, 2016
@LastWeekTonight #IHaveNeverSatInAPremiumLocation Thursday pic.twitter.com/gVdcMlpIXZ
— Jay Mack (@jamespmack) April 4, 2016
We'll wear this to the #wednesday game!! #ihaveneversatinapremiumlocation @LastWeekTonight pic.twitter.com/yjMoenWMdj
— Lizzy (@lizzyuppaz) April 4, 2016
Outstanding. Here are the full contest rules, by the way.
If you want to watch the video of Oliver's full rant against Trost and the Yankees -- and I suggest you do -- the link is right here. You are forewarned though, some of the language is NSFW.
What do the Yankees think of this? Not much, apparently. Here's a statement from team president Randy Levine
"Everyone is welcome at Yankee Stadium. And I thank John Oliver for buying Yankees tickets."
Monday's game has already been postponed due to nasty weather in New York. That means you still have a chance to enter the contest for Tuesday's makeup game.
