Playoff Tickets Harder to Come By

Buying tickets in St. Louis (photo from USA Today)

To get a ticket to a World Series game nowadays, the average fan must do one of three things: own all or part of a season ticket (or have a good friend who does), get lucky on the Internet or pay the premium price from a broker.

• Tickets are particularly tight in St. Louis for the three games in new Busch Stadium this week, an example of the changing environment with smaller stadiums, increased demand and more season ticketholders to accommodate. The Cardinals held an online lottery for 2,000 tickets for each of the three Series games, and 350,000 people registered for it. (Fans could register once per e-mail address.)

The Detroit Tigers made 10,000 tickets for each game available for sale on their website and by phone last week, and they sold out in 30 minutes.

Joe Strohm, Cardinals vice president for ticket sales, provided a breakdown of where the tickets for the 46,500 seats at Busch Stadium went:

•35,000 to season ticketholders. The Cardinals have a season-ticket base of 27,000 this year, plus a long-standing bonus plan entitling season ticketholders prior to 1985 to buy extra playoff tickets. The season-ticket base (which includes partial plans that are added up to full-season equivalents) increased from about 21,000 in the old park.

•8,000 to Major League Baseball for its 30 clubs, licensees, sponsors, broadcast right holders, home and visiting players, umpires and the media.

•2,000 to the public at large in the online lottery. "It's the most fair way of doing it, because everybody has an opportunity," Strohm says.

1,500 for internal use, such as sponsors and "group leaders" who organize group sales of 300 or more tickets during the season.

Vaccaro estimates about 20% of fans at the Series games in Detroit bought their tickets in the secondary market.

• Tickets from brokers ranged from about $380 to $3,500 for Saturday's Game 1, he says. In St. Louis, they're going for $345 to $5,000, depending on location, he says.

Some season ticketholders sell their playoff tickets to pay for the next year's season plan, he says. from USA Today article, 10/23/06

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