Who Can Afford Baseball Anymore?

Russell Adams wrote the Wall Street Journal piece I talked about today, regarding how hard it is for regular fans to get tickets to post-season baseball games. With first-round prices up 10%, and World Series prices up 35% to $250 for box seats, how can an American family afford to sit in the stands anymore?

Worse is the squeeze put on here in St. Louis by the new Cardinals ballpark, which has fewer seats -- but so many of them are sold on a full-season basis that only 3,000 tickets are available per game to non-season-ticketholders, down from 14,000 last year. Good thing those games are televised into my house at no extra charge.

Major League Baseball is also continuing its crackdown on scalpers, to the point where some teams will revoke your season tickets if you sell them to someone else for even one game that you can't attend. Instead, the Cards and other teams set up their own in-house scalping agency, the Prime Seat Club, in which only they can re-sell those tickets -- with an extra surcharge, of course (take a minute to review a column I wrote 18 months ago called Scalping The Scalping Laws).

"It's not about the money, it's all about the fans." Riiiiight.