Back to web version
Ways to buy tickets are changing
Buying tickets to Royals games is becoming similar to shopping on eBay or Craig’s List.
Go to the team’s website, royals.com, and you’ll find the team auctioning off tickets and also providing a place for private individuals to buy and sell tickets.
Gone are the days when teams only sold directly to customers at face ticket value and would never be go-betweens for private sales. The Royals, like other major league teams, are looking for more ways to make money. But these new methods also give fans access to otherwise unavailable seats.
Currently, the Royals are taking bids on four sets of tickets to the May 31 game against Cleveland on what is John Mayberry Bobblehead Night. The seats are behind the home plate area on the lower level. One pair of tickets and one set of four tickets come with a Mayberry autographed bat. The other tickets do not. High bids ranged from $160 for the pair to $295 for the set of four as of today. Just for the record, those seats otherwise sell for $37 each.
Mark Tilson, the Royals vice president of sales and marketing, said the team plans to offer other tickets and memorabilia for auctions as the year goes on.
The team’s website also has what is called StubHub, a ticket marketplace run by an eBay affiliate. Sellers can post tickets for sale and set their price. They pay a 10 percent transaction fee to StubHub. Buyers pay a 15 percent transaction fee. Payments are made online using credit cards. The Royals and other Major League teams using StubHub get a portion of each sale.
Tilson said a key benefit of the StubHub is that season ticket holders have a viable market for tickets they can’t use. As a result, that helps the Royals persuade people to buy or renew season ticket packages, he said.
For ticket buyers, the biggest advantage to buying seats through the Royals auction or StubHub is that such seats may be difficult to get in other ways. Most dugout box seats are held by season ticket holders and not available from the Royals for single-game sales. That means you have to know season ticket holders or go to brokers who will usually mark up the prices and charge service fees.
The other ways to get dugout plaza seats are to go the park on game day and hope someone shows up with extra tickets or that the Royals have some returned tickets, such as when the visiting team does not use its full allotment. Both of these options can be long-shots, especially if you need more than one or two tickets.
• • •
The Royals wrap up their longest homestand of the season with a three-game set against Detroit that starts tonight and ends with an afternoon game Thursday — one of only five weekday afternoon games this year. There were eight last year. There are no afternoon Saturday games this year, so if daylight weekend baseball is your thing, Sunday is your day.