Everything's going swimmingly for the Yankees on the field, and it seems like they've finally gotten the hang of things in the PR department as well. According to Darren Rovell of CNBC, the team has decided against gouging raising their ticket prices sharply for playoff games played at Yankee Stadium.
Rovell reports that non-premium tickets will cost the same amount for postseason games as they did for regular season contests. That's a major departure from the past for the Yankees, who charged 30 to 130 percent more for seats around their old ballpark during the 2007 ALDS against the Indians. The tickets will be pricier should the team move onto the ALCS, but a 27 percent increase doesn't seem particularly egregious.
It would be easy, and not entirely incorrect, to snort and say that that the ticket prices were already too high and the Yankees don't deserve any positive press for anything having to do with them. A fair view, but it ignores the fact that they could have used this as an opportunity to recover whatever revenues were left on the table by sluggish sales of premium seats during the regular season and didn't. Companies don't tend to make those kinds of decisions, so anyone heading out for October baseball should, for a brief moment, thank the Yankees for leaving some lucre on the table.
Happily, there's still good reason to summon up some ticket price outrage. Major League Baseball controls the prices of tickets for the World Series and they've mandated that there shall never be a ticket with a face value of less than $50 for the Fall Classic. That means that bleacher seats, normally $14, will be jacked up more than 200 percent if the Yankees can navigate their way through the first two rounds.
Presumably that holds for the obstructed view seats as well, which would make for the worst value to hit the Bronx since Kei Igawa.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City and is a contributor to FanHouse.com and ProFootballTalk.com in addition to his duties for NBCNewYork.com.
