Four tickets, Yankees/Indians regular season game: $10,750

Who said anyone is forced to buy tickets? And frankly, if the Yankees can get anyone to pay $10,750 for four seats to see a midweek Mariners game, God bless them as far as I can concerned.

But the fact that those tickets are sitting there unsold *is* a clear demonstration that there is an invisible hand. They built a new stadium and priced those tickets with corporate excess in mind, got hit by a financial crisis that has Fortune 500 cutting back on those excesses and that is why those ridiculously priced tickets are sitting there on ticketmaster right now unsold. The invisible hand is basically saying, "$10,750 for four tickets to a regular season game ain't happening in this economy. The corporations didn't snatch them up, and the random guy like me who was tooling around on ticketmaster at 3 a.m. is laughing his ass off when he sees the price. So get used to some empty seats." The organization will still be wildly profitable, just from the TV network and licensing alone. But it will be interesting to see whether they reckon they can make more money by cutting ticket prices next season to a level that reflects the economy--which in a way would entail eating some crow--or, after the luster of the new stadium wears off, whether it makes more sense to just give away a ton of tickets and deal with some empty seats that are way beyond the price that supply and demand dictate for a regular-season baseball game.

 

If "people will find a way to pay for tickets" then you are arguing that the invisible hand works, i.e. that the laws of supply and demand are at work. If people are paying for the tickets at those prices, it means that there is enough demand to dictate those prices. We'll see if that is the case. I'm never surprised by anything in New York. But as I said, the fact that those seats are sitting unsold on ticketmaster when they were counting on a frenzied excitement to get into the new stadium suggests that it hasn't worked out to plan. If the Yankees get off to a bad start and aren't in the thick of a pennant race? I have a feeling they will be fudging attendance figures the way the Knicks did for years.