Patients of chiropractor Thomas Haveron may benefit from efforts by the New York Yankees to fill in row upon row of empty seats that have become the public image of the team’s new $1.5 billion ballpark.
Haveron, 47, had four season tickets to Yankees games for more than a decade, giving away most to those he treated. This year, he cut the order in half to afford third-row seats behind the dugout at $850 each per game.
Haveron now has a second pair of high-priced seats to hand out for eight extra games. The Major League Baseball team yesterday cut season-ticket prices for some premium seats by up to 50 percent, and offered refunds and free tickets to others who had purchased seats for as much as $2,500 a game.
“At least they are making that effort and trying to appease everybody,” Haveron, who lives in Warren, New Jersey, said in a telephone interview.
The price adjustments are effective immediately for a few hundred seats at the 52,000-seat Bronx ballpark, the team said in a statement yesterday.
Some seats that were priced at $2,500 per game were cut to $1,250, and others at $1,000 now will be $650. Fans who purchased such season-ticket plans will receive either a refund or a credit, the team said.
The discounts and giveaways extend down to seats that sold for $325 apiece, with season-package buyers in that price range eligible for free extra tickets.
Too Expensive
The decision came more than three weeks after Yankees Managing General Partner Hal Steinbrenner said a small number of seats were overpriced because of economic conditions, and after the first homestand in the ballpark created headlines about blocks of empty seats in the choicest locations.
“The Yankees took a significant image hit with all those empty seats next to the field,” Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, said in a telephone interview. “One of the tricks of running a sports franchise is image. The main way image is created is through TV and the main way you convey excitement and buzz is by having the seats filled.”
The Yankees didn’t say exactly how many seats were involved in the revision or how much money might be refunded, credited or lost through giveaways. The Associated Press said as many as 1,895 seats were in the affected sections, including 40 percent of front-row locations.
Steinbrenner said that the Yankees have sold more than 3.4 million tickets, 85 percent of their premium seats and the equivalent of 37,000 full-season tickets.
Maximize Income
“The Yankees have been successful selling the vast majority of their season,” Steve Patterson, former president and general manager of the National Basketball Association’s Portland Trail Blazers and now president of ProSports Consultants in Portland, Oregon, said in a telephone interview. “But it’s better to get something out of every seat than to see them go unused. It’s just like discounting an airline’s seat or somebody that’s selling apples and they are spoiling in the grocery store.”
The Yankees lost their home opener on April 16 to the Cleveland Indians and were beaten 22-4 two games later as the Indians set a major-league record by scoring 14 runs in the second inning. As those runs piled up, television cameras often showed sections of empty high-priced seats behind home plate and down the baselines.
“As a result, and for many of our fans who have already purchased full-season suite seats in such premium locations, the Yankees are announcing today a program that adjusts certain prices and benefits affecting such suite seats,” Steinbrenner said.
(Source: Bloomberg)
