Yankees exec doesn't want value shoppers buying 'premium' tickets
Yankees COO Lon Trost went on the Boomer & Carton show to explain the team's new ticket policy. The explanation was ... an interesting one.
By
Dayn Perry
•
1 min read
As noted in this space, the Yankees recently took the retrograde step of no longer permitting fans to use print-at-home tickets. The official rationale had something to do with preventing fraud, but it's really about the team's ongoing dispute with StubHub, a prominent presence in the secondary ticket market. Basically, the Yankees want a minimum price on all tickets, and StubHub isn't willing to meet those demands. So now the Yankees have attempted to undercut StubHub with this rather fan-unfriendly policy.
On Thursday, Yankees COO Lon Trost appeared on WFAN's Boomer & Carton to discuss the new policy. Along the way, he dropped this rather interesting explanation (via Neil Best, Newsday) ...
“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.”
To be fair, Trost was doing a radio interview, and sometimes in the course of speaking extemporaneously things come out a little more unpolished than we'd like. That said, it sounds a lot like the Yankees are trying to keep the "undesireables" out of the good seats. As Trost indicates, that's quite possibly a concern on the part of the folks who pay face value for those seats, so assuming that's true this really reflects more upon their delicate natures than it does Trost.
The Yankees!
