Sell Your Kidney For Tickets—Thanks Steinbrenner Family!

In the late 1990’s I would habitually attend baseball games at Diamondback Stadium in Phoenix, AZ (called Bank One Ballpark at first, now Chase Field). My dad used to split season tickets on the ground level, ten rows back behind the first base line for about $500 per season.

We’d go to about 10 games in the summer and have a pretty awesome time out.

Yeah, food at the park was overpriced, the Diamondbacks were so-so, and many people in the Grand Canyon State could care less about another major league team that looked more like an overpriced farm league (or in the case of the Cardinals, Canadian football).

But it was fun, relatively inexpensive and a good time for the whole family. That was back when I was really into baseball—not as a player but definitely as a fan (not of the Diamondbacks)—so it was cool to go to a game on the weekend and be able to talk about it in school the next day (which was one of the few times I broke out of the geeky soccer player mold I had created for myself).

With the creation of new stadiums across the country, including two in New York City for the Mets and the Yankees, MLB franchises are looking to expand during the worst period of economic turmoil since the great depression.

And the prices for tickets to these new stadiums are outrageous.

I guess I was a lucky kid when I was 12—I got to go to a new stadium in the middle of the desert for practically free every other weekend during the summer—seats were something around 25 dollars each to bond with my father for a few hours. And since the Diamondbacks sucked in 1999, we got a lot of time to talk to each other.

Checking both StubHub and TicketsNow.Com, tickets to the new Yankees stadium are going for $69 each minimum, ground level seating is going anywhere from $100 to $1000 FOR. A. SEAT.

I checked seating at both New Yankees Stadium and Chase Field Park for a quick comparison, of the same section my father and I used to have: Section 110-111 Row 23, Seats A-B; Field Level, First Base Line. At Chase they've gone up a bit to about $35 bucks per seat. But New Yankees Stadium the same exact seats are going for $1200 a seat.

I guess my dream of seeing a Yankees game with my father died when the house that Ruth built was put on the auctioning block.

That’s right folks, sell your children into slavery, your mother into prostitution, and your father’s kidney’s to the black market; it’s the only way you’re going to get seats at any of these new parks.

I was lucky that the team whose games I went to were horrible at their inception (as many expansion teams are) and we were in the right place at the right time. Yankees and Mets game tickets have always been expensive—so I guess it’s the way of the world too.

In a warped way I can see the reasoning for the high prices at these new parks—we’re in a recession, money’s tight, everything is expensive; but I don’t think it’s the only reason.

These clubs want to pay off their new endeavors as soon as possible.

The fanaticism of the fans who want to be the first to sit in the seats and watch these games is outrageous and the ticket prices reflect that. With every ticket that goes for $1,000 the team pays off another square foot of concrete in their new luxurious field of dreams. 

They’re trying to do what everyone else is doing right now: pay off debts, get out of the red, even out and make sure that the third child in the family can go to college.

And who knows when Jeter will ever get that chance.