Strasburg's First Start and Average Ticket Prices

As most know by now, Nationals top pitching prospect Stephen Stasburg is scheduled to make his major league debut on June 8th against the Pittsburgh Pirates. There is a ton of hype surrounding his start so SeatGeek decided to look at the effect this is having on ticket prices. Last night we shared the following findings with ESPN’s Baseball Analyst Buster Olney:

Strasburg’s start was officially announced on June 1st and tickets are transacting at $103.28 since the announcement. Washington Nationals tickets have sold for an average of $51.11 this season, which is more than half the price we are seeing for the Strasburg start. Hype around the Strausburg start drove up Nationals ticket prices over the last few weeks. For the first half of May, Nationals tickets sold at $42.28 and from May 15th to June 1st they are up to $61.15.  They went from the 19th most popular team in baseball on the resale market during the first half of May to the 7th most popular team (sandwiched between the Phillies and the Twins).

Olney mentioned us using some of our data during last nights episode of Baseball Tonight – we were really excited when our friends texted us to let us know they had heard SeatGeek on TV. Subsequently, we have looked up the average ticket prices for the 10 games leading up to Strasburg’s start and our findings are also very interesting.

ESPN’s Jason Crasnick believes Strasburg is the most hyped draft pick of all time, alongside Alex Rodriguez and Mark Prior and the hype is evident by the enormous ticket jump for his start. Only time will tell if he lives up to the hype like A-Rod or fails to like Prior.