StubHub Becoming Main Destination For Fans Asking Giants For World Series Tix

MLB Giants Managing VP/Ticket Sales & Services Russ Stanley said the club is aggressively sending throngs of ticket-seeking fans and VIPs to StubHub given the extreme paucity of available ticket inventory the club has for this year's World Series. The club's season-ticket base of nearly 30,000 full-season equivalents, representing about 75% of AT&T Park capacity, is up by nearly half since the Giants won the '10 World Series. And that heightened season-ticket base has significantly compressed what Stanley and the club have been able to do for last-minute ticket seekers. "There's just tremendous pressure, incredible pressure on any sort of single-game tickets I can find," Stanley said. "I'm really, really limited on what I can do for people compared to two years ago, so I'm sending lots of people to StubHub. They're safe and secure and we know the purchasing experience there." To that end, Stanley said the club remains highly receptive to the secondary market, a marked difference from clubs such as the Cubs and Yankees that assumed comparatively more adverse stances on resale around their games. The Giants were trailblazers in team-sanctioned resale, creating their Double Play window prior to the establishment of the MLBAM-StubHub alliance in '07. "Our fans are very savvy, very accustomed to how the secondary market works," Stanley said. "So we've taken the opposite approach as some other clubs" (Eric Fisher, SportsBusiness Journal).

GIANT RETURNS: StubHub Head of U.S. Communications Joellen Ferrer said due to the excitement around the Giants' 8-3 win in Game 1 of the World Series, the website "saw price points increasing by 10 to 20 percent" prior to Thursday night's Game 2. In S.F., Andrew Ross reported ticket prices on StubHub actually declined for Thursday's Game 2 "after the previous evening's blowout, probably reflecting Detroit Tigers fans' hesitation to shell out big bucks." With the Giants holding a 2-0 series lead heading into the three games at Comerica Park, Ross wrote, "Watch ticket prices to dip even further for games in the Motor City" (SFGATE.com, 10/25).

THE SUITE LIFE: The Tigers indicated that they have "leased all of Comerica Park's 73 luxury suites" for the World Series games at the ballpark. The team said that they were leased to "mostly corporate" clients. In Detroit, Bill Shea reported a suite during the World Series went for $29,920 "for a minimum of 10 fans to $46,300 for a maximum of 22 people." The prices "don't include food and beverage costs, but some do include credit toward a 2013 regular-season suite" (CRAINSDETROIT, 10/25).