Your World Series Prize Is More Expensive Red Sox Tickets
PHOTO BY MARK FLEMING
What a difference a winning season makes. Just this spring the Red Sox were luring disaffected fans to Fenway with cheap(er) beer. Now, they’re raising ticket prices on us.
Sad though this is, we will say that they’re at least doing it in a manner that makes sense in an Econ 101 kind of way. They’re tiering prices based on demand for individual games. From a team press release:
The Red Sox today introduced a variable pricing structure for regular season home games at Fenway Park in 2014, which will raise prices for 16 games in high demand and lower prices for 16 games in lower demand. The middle 49 games will have a mixture of increases, decreases, and categories that stay the same.
That means that some games may actually be cheaper than they would have been this year. Overall, though, there’ll be a 4.8 percent rise in the average single game price. President and CEO Larry Lucchino offered a justification in that release:
Numerous factors influence our annual ticket pricing decisions … We strive to maintain affordability and ticket accessibility while still generating the revenues necessary to fuel our baseball operations, to fund continuing improvements to the ballpark, and to make enhancements to the fan experience – the three main areas in which we reinvest our revenue.
We liked the cheap beer promotion better, but what can you do. Those of us who don’t want to shell out more cash can go to the low-demand games. Seeing the Sox play the Royals (or whoever) isn’t so bad. Winning, it’s a burden, really.
