Ticket prices — and demand — still rising

A $4 seat at Yankee Stadium in 1972 now is selling for $250.

NEW YORK (AP) — Even Keith Olbermann had sticker shock when he saw the Ruthian prices for Yankee Stadium’s final year.

His family first purchased four season tickets for seats behind the Yankees dugout in 1972 at $4 per seat for each game. This year, the price jumped to $250 from $150 — more than double the $112 average for equivalent seats near the Mets’ dugout across town.

“The thought did cross my mind, my investment in this might be better spent at Shea Stadium and Citi Field,” the MSNBC broadcaster said.

Still, he kept the seats. All the offseason talk of the Mitchell Report and steroids hasn’t dented baseball’s boom.

The Chicago Cubs have sold more than 2,775,000 tickets and had just 500,000 remaining at the start of the week. The Red Sox capped full season equivalents at just under 22,000 at Fenway Park, where capacity is 37,400 at night and 36,984 during the day. And Major League Baseball says the sale of season-ticket equivalents is up 4 percent.

“I think we’ll draw between 80 and 81 million this year, which is an amazing number,” baseball commissioner Bud Selig said. “We’re having explosive growth right now. This sport has never been more popular, and the interest is just unbelievable.”

Baseball is coming off a milestone year. The 30 teams drew 79.5 million fans in 2007, a record average of 32,785.

This year, fans who want smokin’ seats for the Bronx Bombers have to be nearly as wealthy as the star players they watch. And still, the Yankees might sell out the season or come close before opening day.

Scrambling for tickets is at its most frenzied in New York, where both teams are entering the final seasons of their ballparks. The Yankees have sold 3.75 million of about 4.4 million available tickets, and the Mets are on track to draw 4 million at home for the first time.

Tickets for the Yankees’ final regular-season game, against Baltimore on Sept. 21, were listed this week at up to $16,199 apiece on StubHub.com. Of the 3,000 seats originally priced by the team at $250, only 111 weren’t renewed as season tickets, and the Yankees said they were resold within 24 hours.

Olbermann remembered back to 1972, when four seats for the season wound up costing $1,056 (there were 15 doubleheaders). Now the seats — so close to the field that his mother got hit by a ball when Chuck Knoblauch overthrew first base eight years ago — cost him $81,000.

“From $1,000 a season, it’s $1,000 a game,” he said. “So literally they’ve now crossed that mark where it’s 81 times more expensive to see the season as it was in 1972.”

According to the Consumer Price Index, $4 in 1972 is about $20 now — meaning even when adjusted for inflation, there’s been a 12-fold increase for the best box seats.

Twenty years ago, many teams had just two prices — box and reserved.

Now, most clubs have dozens of ticket levels, sometimes different ones for season tickets, advance sales and day-of-game purchases. Some teams also charge differing amounts depending on the opponent and the day of the week.

This season, clubs also must contend with StubHub. Twenty-nine clubs — all but the Red Sox — have agreed to make the Web site their official resale outlet. As of Tuesday, 434,000 Yankees home tickets were available on the Web site, including more than 6,000 for some games.

Bob Bowman, chief executive officer of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, said 400,000 tickets already have changed hands on StubHub, where buyers pay a 10 percent fee and sellers are charged a 15 percent commission.

The Washington Nationals, who move into a new ballpark, had 2.7 percent of their seats available on StubHub this week. For the Chicago Cubs, 6.8 percent of Wrigley Field’s tickets are on the Web site. For Dodger Stadium, it’s 3 percent.

Bowman said he thinks StubHub makes fans less reticent to purchase seats from teams because they know there’s an easy resale market: “If the average fan see there’s a vibrant, legal, robust secondary market, the more likely they are to buy tickets.”

Even for the Florida Marlins.

Last in the major leagues with 1.37 million fans at home last year, the Marlins command $179 for tickets in the first row of seats behind home plate and $153 for rows two through four. But their Fish Tank section of bleachers in right goes from $9-15, depending on the opponent and when the tickets are bought.

“A baseball stadium is a microcosm of a civilization, where very often it is the wealthy who support the programs and services that are taken advantage of by the less fortunate,” Marlins president David Samson said.