The Yankees may have opted out of MLBAM's deal with StubHub and reportedly will sign with Ticketmaster, but StubHub still “plans to aggressively market its services to Yankees fans, including season-ticket holders who attend just a few games a season,” according to a source cited by John Crudele of the N.Y. POST. The source said, “Our expectation is that Yankees fans will continue to buy and sell on StubHub.” Crudele notes Yankees season-ticket holders “include many brokers who buy the tickets only so they are eligible for valuable post-season seats.” The team's deal with Ticketmaster will “presumably include the minimum-price provision the Yanks crave.” But StubHub “plans to open at least one pick-up and drop-off location near the Stadium so fans who like to deal with it rather than TicketMaster can do so without difficulty.” While the Yankees “may want fans to use TicketMaster -- so that the price of resold tickets is close enough to Yanks-sold tickets to encourage higher sales of the latter -- the team can’t demand they do so.” Fans are “still going to look for discounts on the Internet, and teams are going to be annoyed by it” (N.Y. POST, 12/13).
THANKS, TICKET OAK: The Yankees are being joined by the Angels and Cubs in not opting into the league-wide deal, but StubHub President Chris Tsakalakis said the company will "continue to sell" tickets for those teams. Tsakalakis: "We’ll just deliver our tickets differently, and the truth is we cover all the other professional sports. We don’t have partnerships with every team, but we’re able to be the biggest and the best across professional sports” (“Markets Now,” Fox Business, 12/12). He said of the three teams not opting into the MLBAM deal concerns pricing, "These teams are very sensitive to market prices for tickets to see their games and they don't like it when tickets on StubHub have prices lower than their face value. They feel like they're being undercut.” Tsakalakis added, “There are times where tickets sell below face value, yes. That's true of every single major league sport. It's not just StubHub. It’s the market price. We don't set the market price, our sellers set the prices” (“CBS This Morning,” CBS, 12/12).
