River Avenue Blues

A contextless table of Yankee ticket prices by year has elicited a small reaction from a few bloggers. WasWatching tossed up a brief post on the subject and iYankees noted the cost of going to the game.

The AP presented in the information in a way that suggests that Yankee ticket prices have, by and large, gone up for over forty consecutive seasons now. The tickets for field boxes were $3.50 in 1967 and now cost $250. Except for consecutive years in which the prices were held steady, then, the cost to attend games has been on the rise since the days of Lyndon Johnson, right?

Well, note quite. Take a look at this chart with a third column I added using inflation data. A graph put together by Tommy follows the table.

Year	Ticket Price	2008 Dollars
1967	$3.50	$22.18
1968	$4.00	$24.33
1969	$4.00	$23.07
1970	$4.00	$21.82
1971	$4.00	$20.91
1972	$4.00	$20.26
1973	$4.00	$19.07
1974	$4.00	$17.18
1975	$5.00	$19.67
1976	$5.50	$20.46
1977	$6.00	$20.96
1978	$6.50	$21.10
1979	$7.00	$20.41
1980	$7.50	$19.27
1981	$7.50	$17.47
1982	$8.50	$18.65
1983	$9.00	$19.13
1984	$9.00	$18.34
1985	$9.75	$19.18
1986	$9.75	$18.83
1987	$10.00	$18.63
1988	$11.00	$19.68
1989	$12.00	$20.49
1990	$12.00	$19.44
1991	$12.50	$19.43
1992	$14.50	$21.88
1993	$16.00	$23.44
1994	$17.00	$24.28
1995	$25.00	$34.73
1996	$25.00	$33.73
1997	$35.00	$46.16
1998	$45.00	$58.44
1999	$50.00	$65.53
2000	$55.00	$67.61
2001	$62.00	$74.11
2002	$62.00	$72.96
2003	$72.00	$82.84
2004	$80.00	$89.65
2005	$90.00	$97.55
2006	$110.00	$115.51
2007	$150.00	$153.15
2008	$250.00	$250.00

A funny thing happens on the way to 2008. It now appears as though ticket prices for the Yankees remained steady, in 2008 dollars, for nearly thirty seasons. In 1967, it cost $3.50 to purchase a Yankee field box seat. That’s $22.18 in 2008 dollars. Twenty four years later, in 1994, it cost $17 to purchase the same ticket or $24.28 in 2008 dollars. In 1994, $3.50 from 1967 would get you $15.53. Ticket prices, in other words, were tracking inflation.

The spike — and we seem to still be in the middle of it — occurred following the 1994 season when ticket prices went through the roof. All of a sudden, the Yankees were good, the Yankees were popular, and the Yankees were very, very expensive. In 14 years, Yankee ticket prices have increased by a factor of 10 from a 2008 value of $24.28 in 1994 to $250 in 2008. That’s crazy.

Meanwhile, some bloggers and fans always ask why, and for that, we turn to the market. The Yankees are selling tickets at a face value of $250 per, and they’re selling out the stadium. Tickets for premium games sell on StubHub for well over that value. The market, in other words, can afford it, and the Yankees are just trying to capture their revenues.

If you can sell out a stadium at $150 a ticket and at $250 a ticket, what owner wouldn’t charge the higher amount? The fans, of course, are the ones who lose out, and it times like these when we remember that baseball is a business. It’s all about the bottom line.