Baseball Economics

[Shann]

My cynical office manager told me that he expected the Red Sox to win the next couple of games so that MLB could maximize profits. Much like with the heavyweight championship, there is probably too much at stake to "throw" a game, so I disagreed.

However, the question we came up with is, is what happens if a series only goes 5 games and I have tickets for the 7th game? If a game is rained out you get a rain check, but what happens if the game is just not played?

It would seem to be a real pain to try to refund all those games every year that don't go the whole series, but unless Atlanta is playing, all the tickets are gone for all the playoff games.

 

[Geraldo]

As far as I know, you get a refund. When I lived near Cleveland in the mid-1990s, season tickets were hard to get. A group of us agreed to a plan to purchase tickets and divide them between us. The guy who bought the tickets thought we were in when his credit card was charged--wrong. They charged everybody's card who sent in, then credited them if you didn't make the cut.

This brings me to another complaint about baseball. I've been to a few ALCS or NLCS games, but it's hard for an individual to get playoff tickets. Season ticket holders have a chance, and companies get blocks of them for sponsorship. There's really nothing wrong with that, except that a lot of the people who go using company tickets may not have been to a game during the season, if ever. Nothing galls me more than someone taking up a seat at the playoffs and reading a book (I've seen it), while some true fan couldn't get in.