What's going on with Yankee ticket sales? Subway Series tickets are being discounted by the team!

New York Yankees president Randy Levine can blather all he want about the evil StubHub somehow lowering attendance, but what does he have to say about this? Goldstar, with the full permission and cooperation of the New York Yankees, is marketing discounted tickets to the Subway Series! Yes, you heard that right. Not only is the Subway Series, usually a perennial hot ticket, not sold out at Yankee Stadium this year, but the team is having to market tickets for below face value in order to get fans into the ballpark!

Right now, field level, main level, and terrace level tickets are available at a 20% discount for Friday and Sunday. These are some of the better seats in the ballpark. The tickets are going for $48-$72 for Friday, and $64-$180 on Sunday.

Goldstar is a discount ticket service that works more like Theatermania than StubHub in that the entities themselves market direct tickets for their newsletter and website. For example, Squawker Jon and I went to a concert at Avery Fisher Hall last week, which had discounted tickets through the service. The Yankees have sold some of their Audi seating and other more expensive seating in the past through Goldstar, but this is the first time I have seen them market big games like the Subway Series through the service.

The thing of it is, though, that this is one series where StubHub prices are being sold for above face value -- at least the less expensive seats like the grandstand and bleachers and standing room only. So it's very interesting that the Yanks are doing this for this series, but telling, in that these are pricey seats that have never moved from Yankees.com, due to lack of interest. Hmmmm, maybe the Yanks ought to realize that those seats are overpriced in the first place.

In other news, Andrew Marchand of ESPN New York had an "exclusive" story where some unnamed Yankee official fulminated about how StubHub was unfair to season ticket holders. Oh, please. The next time the Yanks care about the Joe Average season ticket holder -- especially those holding partial plans -- will be the first time. As Squawker reader EateggsEveryMorning put it:

Thank you, great post. I agree on every point. I had the 15-game Sunday plan for many years and loved it. Then they built the new stadium and switched my plan to a Monday-Tuesday plan without telling me. I couldn't go to most of the games, and could barely sell them for $5 on StubHub. Now they've taken all the premium Sunday games out of the Sunday plan and added 3 mid-week games, so it's not even really a Sunday plan. That, the no-post-season-guarantee thing, higher ticket prices and higher parking fees makes it a non-seller. Basically less for more. I've been contacted 3 times this year by the Yankees begging me to buy the plan. Not a chance.

The unnamed Yankee official also claimed that professional ticket brokers were "shorting" the sales, and claimed that StubHub was allowing tickets to be put on sale before they were printed. Um, guys, season ticket holders know what seats they have, which is how they listed them. Why is that so difficult for them to understand?

I've heard and read all sorts of horror stories about how the Yankes have messed with those with partial plans -- making their tickets worse, taking away Opening Day and Old Timers' Day, adding games they don't want, and taking away games they do want, and raising prices. Now we are supposed to believe that Randy Levine et al are just concerned about their season ticket holders? Puh-lease.

There is a lower demand for tickets this year, which is why prices are dropping. But instead of examining why that is so, Randy Levine and his crew would rather come up with conspiracy theories about the evils of StubHub, the entity that has done a heck of a lot more to make reasonably priced tickets affordable and available to the average fan than the Yanks have.

This is one of the down sides of being a Yankee fan -- an arrogant front office with entitled people who, at best, take their fans for granted, or at worst, screw their fans over time and time again. And we're stuck with all of them for the foreseeable future, because the Steinbrenner kids, unlike their father, never see the need to ever fire anybody. Lovely.

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