For any sports fan, getting out to the stadium or arena in person is always a major treat. And with the rise of the internet marketplace, the selling of tickets has taken a course which some franchises aren’t enthusiastic about.

Stubhub, aside from its blood-sucking exorbitant fees, has emerged as a much more friendly marketplace for consumers than Ticketmaster by allowing for the price of tickets to fluctuate freely as the market dictates.

One franchise that wants to ruin this convenience is the New York Yankees. The satisfaction of getting a ticket last-minute below face value just hours or sometimes even minutes before the game is a great feeling. Like you cheated the system in a totally legal way.

But the Yankees, being the evil force they are, aren’t going to allow you to get that satisfaction anymore.

The Yankees, in all their wisdom, are not allowing print-at-home PDF-file tickets for the upcoming season. Their management has cited fears of fake and duplicate tickets as the rationale for the elimination of print at home tickets, but many have taken notice of the Yankees’ deal with Ticketmaster as the true underlying purpose for this new policy.

The reason the Yankees went and made a deal with Ticketmaster is that the company has a minimum value they will allow for a ticket to be sold at. They did this in spite of Major League Baseball’s deal with Stubhub to try and help out their bottom line.

As anyone who’s watched a Yankee game in the last several years will tell you, there is a noticeable number of empty seats consistently from night to night in the stadium. This is both in part due to a substandard product — the Yankees haven’t fielded a World Series-caliber team in a while — and the general overpricing
of tickets. 

What the Yankees have done here is alienate their fanbase. The franchise has gotten the fans acclimated to winning, and now that they’re trying to cut corners, it has caught up with
the organization.

Another one of the brilliant policies the Yankees have had for a while is their blanket price for every game. Prices don’t vary from series to series.

Logic would dictate the value of a ticket when the Yankees play the Red Sox in September would be more costly than against the Rays in mid-July. But the Yankees do not believe in the fluctuating value based on supply and demand of tickets.

Whenever Bernie Sanders is done pretending he’s going to become president, I have a new job for him.

Being this beacon of status in New York, the Yankees recently dispatched their COO Lonn Trost (a supervillain name if I ever heard one) to WFAN, the radio station that broadcasts Yankee games, and he shot himself in the foot. Trost more or less said they don’t want the riff-raff in with the people who paid face-value for their tickets, condemning the average Yankee fan in favor of the guy in a suit who doesn’t pay attention to the game and scrolls through his iPhone reading emails for nine innings. 

Sports in general have been pricing the normal fan out in favor of corporate interests to woo clients and win political favors for quite some time now (ask Andrew Cuomo about his Mets tickets).

Maybe it’s time for change in the way we buy our tickets. We need to make tickets great again!