Yankees exec gets snobby when defending new ticket policy
It hasn’t been long since the New York Yankees released their new ticket policy for 2016, but the mandate is already causing plenty of unintended consequences for their fans.
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To recap our post from Wednesday, the Yankees announced that the club would no longer allow fans to print out tickets for 2016. The club claimed to be doing this to prevent ticket fraud, but it’s mostly assumed they changed the policy in order to strike back at StubHub.
Basically, the Yankees don’t want fans going on StubHub and buying seats at a discounted price. The new policy makes it much harder for fans to do that.
Team COO Lonn Trost pretty much confirmed that was the case Thursday, telling WFAN the club doesn’t want fans buying “premium” seats at a value price, according to Neil Best of 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.”
We’re going to assume Trost was trying to reassure fans that the ticket policy wouldn’t be a bad thing, but that quote is pretty awful.
First off, fans who sell tickets at less than face value probably have a reason for doing so. It’s likely because they can’t make the game, and would wind up getting zero percent of their money back if they don’t sell the tickets. Sure, selling at a discounted price won’t provide those fans with a full refund, but at least it’s something.
But that’s not the worst part of the quote. Nope, that comes at the end. When Trost says “the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location,” it certainly seems like he’s trying to say poor people shouldn’t mingle with fans who can buy tickets at full price. That’s probably not what he meant, as saying that would be a PR nightmare, but it certainly comes off that way.
Not surprisingly, some fans aren’t too happy with Trost’s quote.
And, of course, Trost already has a parody account on Twitter in which he enjoys using the phrase “premium.”
[Elsewhere: Madison Bumgarner brought his horses to spring training]
Trost’s line of thinking is a major problem. Going to a baseball game these days can be expensive, particularly for a family. There are probably some fans who aren’t normally able to afford tickets who turn to StubHub looking for a better deal so they can actually take their kids to the park and sit in decent seats. Those fans can plan on going to significantly fewer Yankees games this season.
The elimination of print-at-home tickets had already alienated a certain set of fans. Instead of putting out that fire, Trost just added a whole can of gasoline with his comments.
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Chris Cwik is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Chris_Cwik
