Two Tickets to Paradise?

A great deal of buzz has been going around this week about the Florida Marlins selling tickets to Roy Halladay's perfect game, which took place last Saturday evening, May 29. You're reading that right - the Marlins, one of only three organizations with multiple World Series championships in the post-1993 Wild Card era, are selling tickets to a game that not only already took place, but featured their team fail to put a single runner on base. Not only are the tickets selling fairly well, but this is not even an unprecedented move. OK, I get it. You buy a previously-unsold ticket to a perfect game for face value, hang onto it for a few years, keep it in good condition, maybe even frame it. Then one day you hope to be able to toss that bad boy up on eBay and sit with your feet up as the bids roll in for such a vaunted piece of memorabilia.

Normally you'd expect me to blast the Florida organization for chasing dollars this way and essentially giving a big F-you to the 25 men who wore a Marlins uniform that night. But oddly enough I'll give the Marlins a pass on this one. Take the revenue where you can get it. I see it more as a passive-aggressive jab by the Marlin organization at their relatively disinterested fan base for coming out to the ballpark in putridly small amounts despite the team being consistently respectable and competitive. It's like they're saying, "ok, all you South Floridians, maybe if you guys did a bit better job of showing up to our games and acting like you really cared about the team, you'd have the right to be miffed at the fact that we are somewhat celebrating a game in which we were dominated. But until then, we don't want to hear it." I'll stop short of saying I applaud the Marlins for doing this. Let's just say I "golf-clap" them for doing it.

But of course, if I didn't have anyone to chide, I wouldn't be writing this. I've got to tweak the few thousand people who actually went online and bought these after-the-fact tickets. Like I said before, I get what your reasoning is - you want that little piece of baseball history and the prospect of selling it at a profit in the future. But do you have no personal pride or sense of what is genuine? Are you really going to anxiously await for your prized May 29 Phillies/Marlins tickets to arrive and then cherish them as if you were actually at the game? Are you going to display the ticket(s) prominently somewhere and pass stories down through the generations about the view from your seat that night, at what point you realized the perfecto was in reach, how nervous you were not to jinx anything, or the lump that went in your throat before Shane Victorino tracked down that monster fly ball to center for the first out of the 9th inning? No, my friend, you are not going to do any of that.

If you bought a ticket to that game after it took place, please look yourself in the mirror. You are now on the level of the guy who buys a $1,000 driver to try to make up for the fact that his golf swing stinks, or the guy who uses his buddy's dog or toddler son to try to pick up women, or Charlie Sheen one night in 1996 when he bought up all the left field lower deck seats at an Angels game in a fruitless effort to get himself a home run ball. Stop trying to cheapen and dilute the experience of the 25,086 who were indeed present at Sun Life Stadium that night. Money can't buy life experiences. That's what makes them so valuable! Yes, I'm certain I read that somewhere.

Hope You Wave the White One

You know Daniel Snyder as a man willing to spend whatever it takes to have a successful Washington Redskins franchise. You laugh at him when he can't buy a championship and his team is usually last in the NFC East. After reading this story I think you will find even more schadenfreude when his team tanks.

Snyder helped run Six Flags into the ground after taking over in 2005. When Snyder became the primary shareholder Six Flags was trading at nearly $12 per share. Last week the share price was under 2 cents when Snyder was ousted as chairman by the board of directors. Running the business into the ground is one thing, but some of the business practices that Snyder employed lacked business ethics and a care for his customers.

Snyder hired his cronies such as CEO Mark Shapiro (former head ESPN responsible for shows such as Cold Pizza). Shapiro proceeded to falsely testify in order to line Snyder’s pockets. "In 2007, Snyder sent Mark Shapiro to lobby the Agawam mayor and the town council into banning visitors from parking at the non-Six Flags-owned lots. Shapiro testified at a public hearing that it was unsafe for pedestrians to walk to Six Flags from anywhere but its own lots. The local politicians banned the satellite lots after Shapiro's appearance."

This is bullshit of course. Snyder just wanted to force the customers to park in his lots and charge you and arm and a leg to park (as much as $30). Fortunately the ruling was later overturned.

Snyder promoted the Flash Pass at Six Flags park which grants VIP status to everyone who forked over a ticket premium as much as $112.  The Flash Pass enables customers to jump to the front of the line because they paid nearly double the price of admission.  This is essentially a way to make a day in the park at Six Flags more tolerbable and a way to say fuck you to people who paid full admission price.  For anyone whose been to theme parks you know the lines are the worst part of the experience.  Of course Six Flags is not the only theme park to implement this price gouging scam but Snyder loves ripping his customers off so much that he implemented Fast Lane Card to bypass security lines at Redskins FedEx Field.  $100 a season allows season ticket holders to bypass security lines. Synder also intends to capitalize an a fans desire to support his team at all costs.

Those not even yet on the aledgedly 200,000 plus waiting listing could jump to the front of the line if they had a few extra thousand dollars lying around to join a premium club.  One of the premium clubs, called the "touchdown club,"  allows for the purchase of lower level season tickets if you pump about $7,000 into the club.  This is similar to Personal Seat Liscenses that have been put in place across the country, but varies from donation programs applied in collegiate atheltics.  Money there goes directly to funding athletic programs including those bleeding the school in the red (insert Title IX jab here). Snyder is not alone though so its somewhat unfair to just pick on him but he is part of the problem. The money from the touchdown club may go to building a team but it also goes towards fattening Snyder's wallet.

Speaking on fattening, Snyder has come under fire for placing many the companies he owns in Six Flags, such as Johnny Rockets.  "So even as he ran a public company into the ground, Snyder managed to keep money flowing into his wallet via pacts with private business he controlled.  That makes Snyder a personal-interest savant, but not a business genius." (Slate article)  As you might guess majority shareholders are pissed off and are contesting that Snyder should be held accountable.

Snyder like many other businesses and businessmen forgot or don't care about customer service.  He is more concerned with driving profits in the short run that he fails to realize what could happen in the long run.  I'm willing to bet that some people stopped going to Six Flags all together when they were charged $30 for parking or that their price of admission still put them at a disadvantage for those who paid for the "Flash Pass".  The "skip the security line" should be criminal, even if the primary reason for the searches are to prevent people from bringing their own food and negative signs into the games.  Snyder can make his money capitalizing on the loyal Redskins fan base, but he won't be winning any awards for owner of the year.

The Trite Utterances of Subpar Sports "Fans," Volume Two

(Before reading this, take a gander down at our Bracket below and provide some input, as much or as little as you want. And remember it's all in good fun and that you can't have a blog in March without having some sort of tournament bracket.)

I would have included this in the "Saturated" post from a few weeks back, but today's issue has grown to warrant its own space. For years we've been hearing the "professional athletes are overpaid, blah blah blah blah blah" refrain, and I don't know about anyone else, but this garbage makes my ears bleed. It's a major go-to phrase for those who make a pastime out of complaining about things they are never going to be able to change. It's a major go-to phrase for those who wish to treat all levels of sports like they are tee-ball and refuse to accept the fact that pro sports are businesses - hence the use of the word "professional."

Of course, that's not to say that there aren't individual athletes who are overpaid. I'd be stupid to try to say that. But you can find people who underperform their compensation at any workplace. I'm talking in general terms, not of individual athletes but of the overall salary scales of pro sports. The vast majority of these guys really do earn their money. Even a dream job is a job. There are levels of pressure and expectations that you or I do not see at our offices. Too often we watch a game for 3 hours out of the day and think that's all there is to it. We forget about the hours spent practicing and training just to get to this point, and how the work only gets harder once you're there. We've all had bad days at our jobs, but I doubt we ever got booed by 50,000 people or had scathing articles written in the paper about us the next day as a result.

Simple business thinking dictates that employees are paid based on the value of the efforts and services they provide. Why did Peyton Manning get paid $14 million this year for his endorsements alone? Because up on a high-floor office somewhere at the headquarters of Mastercard/Sprint/Gatorade/DirecTV, groups of people sat in a room and agreed on the projection that paying Peyton Manning $x to do commercials for their products would ultimately generate $x + $y in additional revenue, with "y" representing a worthwhile profit margin. It's just like how a film studio chooses to throw $20 million at Tom Cruise for a movie on the thought that his name and performance will put at least another $20 million worth of asses in the movie theater seats to go see it. Remember, whether you are a master at throwing a football or bringing a written character to life on screen, it's all entertainment. All in the game, right?

On the same note, a teacher making $45k a year is paid such an amount of money because the numbers dictate that his or her teaching services are worth in the neighborhood of $45k a year to the town and school district. That number is found essentially in terms of the town's basis of tax revenue, as well as the intangible "good name" asset for a school district that a well-performing teaching force creates. You become known as a town with very good schools, and guess what - more families want to live there, thus generating more tax dollars, and allowing the township to charge higher tax rates in the future and being able then to pay its teachers, police, firefighters more. That sound you hear is supply shaking hands with demand.

What I'm really tired of is when people give the old "(insert athlete name here) makes more money in a week than a teacher or patrol officer do in a year!" argument. Listen, no one is saying that teachers, firefighters, police, etc. don't perform a much nobler task than pro athletes do. It's the replaceability factor, technically known as opportunity cost. If I decide to leave my job, it is not going to break the company's back to hire and train a replacement. Same goes for a bus driver, construction worker, or stevedore. It's not that the hard-working everyday Joe is of little worth and easily dispensable, it's just that, when it comes to our own individual lines of work, none of us possess skills to nearly as a high a level as professional athletes do.

Think about it. These athletes are among the several hundred best in the world at their craft. What do you think the world's few hundred best lawyers make in a year? Or the few hundred best investment bankers? It's got to be on par with the few hundred best baseball players or football players. So let's not treat athletes as if they're the only ones out there making tons of money. What it comes down to is, enough people place sufficient value on the display of athletic excellence and top-level competition that they decide to part with considerable money in order to spectate.

You personally may think ticket prices are too high, but no one's holding a gun to your head and making you order season tickets. Because if you don't want to pay those prices, I'm sorry, but there are droves of people standing behind you in line who will, provided the product is good. That's how Major League Baseball last year achieved the fourth-highest regular season attendance level in its history despite poor economic conditions. At least with sports there are low cost viewing alternatives like TV and radio, unlike Broadway, where the only way to see it is live so if you don't want to pony up half your next paycheck for tickets, you're S.O.L.

So before this gets too long (as you can see I'm not into the whole brevity thing lately), I leave you with this: find something to complain about other than professional sports. These salary amounts didn't come from nowhere, but not one dime has to come from your pocket if you don't want it to. But before you get to saying, "why don't we pay our teachers $2 million a year?" just remember that if we ever chose to, then get ready for a tax bill so big it wouldn't be able to fit in your mailbox. Just throwing that overlooked nugget out there.

Burn Yourself Alive

Ticketmaster is indeed headed by Satan. You probably already knew this if you have ever purchased any ticket. Their fees continue to get worse and worse since their merger with Live Nation. Today my brothers I finally paid more in fees than for the actual tickets.

Ticket Price $5.00 x 6
Convenience Charge $5.85 x 6
Tickets/Items $65.10
Order Processing Fee $3.90
Standard Mail No Charge
TOTAL CHARGES $69.00

Only out of the kindness of their cold black heart did Ticketmaster not charge me for shipping. If I wanted to print the tickets out at home it would cost me $2.50 (If anyone understands this please let me know).

For those that don't know Ticketmaster makes all of its money on the charges and not the actual price of the ticket. So Ticketmaster is getting $39 in this case. Several lawsuits have been brought up that allege Ticketmaster is a monopoly. They have exclusive contracts with several venues and sometimes they are the only source to buy tickets (no box office). Exclusive contracts in general need to be banned but well save that for another time.

My fiercest complain with Ticketmaster lies in their presales that specifically make them the only place you can buy tickets first. If there is an event that might sell out you need to be in on the presale to give yourself at chance at decent seats. You have no other options but to pay the fees.

Most of us to not live down the street from the venue box office so we pay the fees online. My suggestion to you is that if an event is highly unlikely to be sold out buy your tickets at the box office and you will see no fee or a smaller fee (Comcast Spectacor charges $3 per ticket anyways and Jerry Jones charges full fees but includes them in the advertised price). If you are going to a concert and are getting general admission seats and the band is not Pearl Jam just wait. I realize this is hard to do when your excited for an event but it will save you some dough. I also urge you to scalp tickets more often because their actually are people with extras and the prices come down around the time of the event.