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The Mets announced yesterday that they have sold over four million tickets in a season for the first time ever.
…that is awesome…it is…that said, i have been 
to several games this season, and, when they announce that night’s attendance on the scoreboard, according to my eyeballs, the number is rarely ever close to how many people had actually been in the building…
…not that this matters…i mean, four million tickets sold is four million tickets sold…but, i’d be curious to know how many people actually passed through the turn-styles – because as a fan who wants the crowd to be loud and passionate, actual bodies in the building is a far more important number to me than how many people paid, but maybe didn’t show…
Yeah, that’s the way it used to be done in the NL. They would announce the actual number of people that went thru the turnstile. The AL I think has always been ever since I remember counted the number of tickets sold. I’m not sure when it changed in the NL to that system.
This is the cue for the citifield haters to chime in.
On Saturday, even in the blowout, the crowd was SO loud. It was awesome. Sucks that the game was awful, but there were definitely as many people as claimed that night.
ive been to games this year where the entire upper deck left and right field wings were completely empty. just a few people and one or two guys sitting in that last seat all the way up top and in the corner.
mets vs. dodgers night game sunday night on ESPN specifically
its been discussed ad nauseum on this board, but having tickets for a sun 1pm game that last-minute-ish transforms itself into 8pm is not a way to pack the stadium, esp. if people have kids or are coming from more than an hour away.
I bet that a good many of those tickets are family of 4 from Connecticut who aren’t on MetsBlog all day and learn of the time change late, then don’t have time to sell on StubHub.
This is a lame excuse. Next Sunday’s time change was made with roughly 3 weeks of notice. Maybe they should just put TBA on all Sunday tickets, but it’s not exactly a new thing that Sunday games change. They mention it all over the place, and pretty much in every broadcast. They send emails. The only people that don’t know are the ones that don’t pay any attention to the Mets for three weeks at a time, and even then you’d think those people would check in and double check everything before doing something they obviously aren’t very familiar.
Ha, there are always 2 or 3 people sitting up in the very last seat at the top in left field. My girlfriend and I always wonder if that might be the “smoking” section.
“turnstiles”
Matt,
The suits comment is just silly. Plenty of us grew up as loyal Mets fans and worked hard to succeed so we can afford lots of good seats at Mets games…oh, and we often wear suits in grown-up world.
As phoola indicated – it is turnstiles. Only Guiseppe Franco can turn styles.
Gotta disagree with you here Gipper….Matt’s not referring to hard-working folks like you….he is most likely referring to corporate ticket holders who own season tickets and do not show a significant percentage of the time, which matters not a whit to the Wilpons, as the tix are paid for.
The new stadium is being built 100% for those folks, not us, as the smaller capacity, higher prices, and PSL stories that have been floating around clearly show.
Actually, I would disagree with that. There will be plenty of affordable seats for everyone. It’s being built to take advantage of those people to provide a more stable income.
There are actually affordable seats… $2K can get you 81 games behind home plate in the Promenade ($25 per) and that’s not awful…
Well, there will be many, many fewer affordable seats for everyone at all times, and for important games and the postseason they will be significantly more expensive and hard to get.
And yes, it is being built to take advantage of “those people” to have a much, much higher income for the Wilpons. The Mets, I would guess, have had a stable income for a long time now.
I love the Mets, but the new stadium is a giant step away from really primarily caring about the average fan and a giant leap towards everything being catered for Corporate America, whether they come to the game or not.
Oh exactly… To get the games you want at a semi-reasonable price you have an opportunity… Season tickets… only way…
Eh…you can’t have it both ways.
Yes, Shea is great WHEN it is actually filled. But, let’s face it, there are FAR more nights when the announced crowd is 50K+ but there are only 35K in the stands for a random midweek game against the Nats. 35K in Shea makes it look half empty. 35K at Citi will still be a great atmosphere of a nearly full house.
Plus, it makes ZERO business sense to have a stadium so large that it allows easy, any random day access to a walk-up fan. By definition, that means there are too many seats!
The smaller size of the stadium means that when there are 40K there for a sellout, the little guys will have been shutout to a large extent; the extra 10 thousand or so who cannot go are today’s upper deck fans—i.e., folks of lesser means who cannot afford season tix. At Shea, with the much larger capacity, more folks can go to a big game. When Citifield is sold out, it will be with thousands less non-corporate folks.
And your last paragraph doesn’t really make much sense regarding “too many seats”—-the upper deck seats, when empty, are hardly a drain on revenue or manpower—-they pretty much just sit there and don’t need maintenance or cost anything when empty. And when the Pope or The Who or the World Series comes, those seats sure come in handy.
And my father is a retired partner of a major company, so I will be getting to go to Citifield and sit in good seats, etc, so I am no flaming leftist, but I think that the new paradigm of the Wilpons is disappointing and very greedy.
My ST’s are going to be in the Promenade IF and cost an aveage of $25… Not terrible… This season I had Upper Boxes, averaging $30… It’s not prcing me out…
Kingman,
I’ve seen it many times the opposite way. The extra, half-empty seats are a drain on finances for the team. There’s the infrastructure that needs to support them (bathrooms, vendors, concessions, etc) that need be run because those sections are open. Also, by having more open seats the demand for tickets lessens, meaning the price for them will as well. The other thing I can think of is they are just taking in too little money for those seats to be profitable.
OK, good points, especially the first one about stadium infrastructure.
And great name by the way.
I’ve been to 10 games or so this year and I have to agree – the number of tickets sold that night never seems to hold water with the actual amount of people there. Mezz Sections 9 & 11 hold it down though!
I’m mezz reserved section 9, I’ve got the tuesday/friday package.
I have the rivalry 7 package along with some single games I bought. Row H.
It is evident that scalpers aka Ticket Brokers have bought packages this year to cash in on packages for the playoffs and Citi Field next year based on the empty seats that keep attending a lot of these games.
Ahhh, ticket brokers– the scum of the earth.
Some of us season ticket holder also have to act like brokers and sell tix we can’t attend for…
Its like that for every team though.
Matt, what does someone’s work attire have to do with whether or not they attend a game they have tickets for?
I think you totally missed his point.
You aren’t THAT naive, are you kbh218? Come on now.
I wear a suit to work everday and I would never buy a ticket for a game and not show up. All of my friends fall in the same boat. Sure, maybe some companies have season tickets that go unused from time to time but making the broad generalization that “suits” are the only ones buying tickets and not showing up is pretty short sighted. There are ticket brokers who buy tickets and cannot resell them. There are non-suit wearing people who buy season tickets in order to ensure they can go to select games and potentially playoff games but cannot make it to all 81 games…etc, etc.
just because you wear a suit doesn’t make you ‘a suit’
i wear a suit to work.
if you seen me at shea you wouldnt know it
You can’t be legitimately offended by this. I was going to comment and be like “Hey! I wear a suit everyday!” but I know this isn’t a bash on me.
So true about Kowalski. I’m in the Mezz 18 on Sunday’s and I can’t imagine him wearing a suit lol.
Haven’t been there in a few weeks been on vacation but I’ll be there for the next sunday game!
Oh come on are you really offended by his comment about suits? We all know real fans wear jerseys and hats!!!
Not really. I just thought it was a little short sighted. I also thought it was pretty ironic coming from the guy who just sold sponsorship rights for his blog to GEICO.
I for one will not stand for Cerrone’s anti-suit rhetoric.
Suit wearers unite!
I am starting a SuitsBlog.com website. It will be sponsored by Armani. We can post messages about all the games we are not going to go to despite the fact that we bought tickets just so the blue collar guy cannot get them. It will be awesome.
Do the Mets have enough money for the Bullpen they’re saving up for?
Today’s NY Times article about new stadiums & PSL’s is pretty interesting. The Mets don’t get criticized as much as the other teams but they don’t exactly get rave reviews either.
I never trust those numbers. What’s to stop the Wilpon’s from buying up their own tickets to bloat the attendance numbers?
The visiting team gets paid off a share of attendance. If they bloated the numbers, they actually pay additional real cash to the visiting team
They get zero value from buying their own tickets and taking them off the market.
Buying their own tickets and taking them off the market doesn’t make sense. Reported revenues would then not be in line with projected revenues that come from a certain level of tickets sold. And this would likely raise suspicion from MLB in terms of revenue sharing.
The Wilpons have more to lose by doing something like that than they have to gain.
You and I might care about how many fans are actually in the stadium, but the Wilpons don’t give a hoot, as long as the tickets are paid for, you can shove them up your you know what for all they care. And it’s not just the Wilpons, it’s pretty much all owners, everywhere.
The Wilpons would prefer that the people who buy tickets show up. If they show up they buy food and merchandise.
If the Wilpons really cared about the additional revenue from in-stadium sales, they wouldn’t have cut capacity in the new stadium by such a large amount.
Yes, they care about it, but they seem to have other priorities.
Please! This post shoots your comment to shreds. A lot of people aren’t showing up anyway. And if it wasn’t the last season at Shea, the Mets probably would be closer to the average attendance of Citi than Shea. They save money on operating costs for opening the entire upper deck for 3k people and operating at closer to capacity for most games. The very few games they sell those extra 5-10k cheap seats (on average across 45 years) doesn’t make up for having a more efficiently filled stadium.
How does that comment undermine my post? I don’t think so.
I have heard of the lower operating-building costs argument. Sorry, I don’t buy it as fully compensating for the forgone revenue.
The popularity of the Mets has grown in recent years and I don’t think it’s just this being the last year that is driving the attendance.
The popularity has grown because they’re good…
Once they suck (and someday they will) we’ll be right back to seeing the 1-2million tickets sold we saw in the 90s.
Once they suck, they will draw lesser amounts no matter what the capacity is. If they were smart owners and more business-minded (like King George is) they would have kept the capacity to near-Shea levels and concentrated on hiring better GMs and executives to ensure the continued success of the team.
The Wilpons only get a C+ when it comes to hiring executives.
Actually, they’ve ensured that those ‘empty seats’ will continue to pay for those empty seats even when the Mets are bad. This helps ensure even when the Mets are sucking they can still afford to pay guys to come here and play at market value or above. You make it sound like the Wilpons were clueless and made this decision for an arbritrary reason, when I’m sure they spent plenty of time making sure they made the right financial decision. Keep in mind the 10s to 100s of million dollars it would’ve cost to build those extra seats just so the occasional extra handful of fans could get in cheaply. When would that have paid off? 2040?
Of course it’s like that for most owners because sports is a business. Everybody is looking to make the most money they can. And to do that, most of the time you have to field a winning team and winning teams bring you championships.
This attendance-don’t-match-tickets-sold thing is a fabricated issue made up by people looking to create controversy such as the Mad Dog or blowhards at the tabloids.
It’s a non-issue, and all teams, even the Yankees, have their fair share of no-shows. The thing that matters most is tickets sold.
What bothers me most is the decreased capacity at Citifield. There is no way they can ever draw 4 million again because of the decreased capacity. Not even close. I think the Wilpons just threw away revenues when they made that decision. Dumb.
Less seats available = higher ticket/concession prices. Do you really think they’re that dumb?
How does less seats available = higher concession prices?
Explain that one to me.
I can see how less seats available sometimes equal higher ticket prices, but there’s a limit to how much you can hike prices. So that’s not always the case.They have to at least be in line (or even less) than what is charged at Yankee stadium.
When you see hoew much ticket prices in levels below the Promenade are going to be in 2009, you will see that there is no limit to ticket price hikes…
even if you were right, and hat all that matters is the total attendance, the Mets have only had 3million plus a handful of times in their history! The only reason we broke the 4 million mark this year, is because it’s the last season.
Citifield will have no problem breaking the 3million mark for many more years than we already have.
In addition, if you look avg attendance, we’ve only only broken the 45,000 avg attendance mark once in our history. 45,000 will be Citifields capacity.
I disagree that the only reason they are breaking 4 million is because this is the last year. I think a lot has to do with the overall rising popularity of the Mets due to players like Wright, Santana, Beltran, Reyes etc.
Therefore, I think for the foreseeable future, they would have had no problems going close to $4 million or above for the next 5-6 years. But now they won’t see that incremental revenue due to the decreased capacity of the park.
Attendance has been rising everywhere in baseball. Not just for the Mets.
i think your out of your mind if you think this 4 million mark is not due to the last season at Shea.
I did not say the last season isn’t a factor. But I think it’s only a partial factor. Last year’s attendance was already over 3.8 million. And that is more than the new park will hold.
They are forgoing revenue for the near term. Maybe in the long run they will come out ahead or break even, but again, the variable is how successful they keep the club. It’s thinking small to believe they can’t field a generally successful and popular club almost every year … to almost anticipate some substantial down periods.
Have you wondered why oil companies make more money when they’re selling LESS gas?
The Mets have already come out ahead with 10,000 less seats. Even if they build those 10,000 extra seats, they won’t make as much money as they would without those 10,000 seats.
Hey, there’s a big difference between gas and ticket prices. And if you know anything about economics, you wouldn’t have used such a poor comparison.
People cannot afford to forgo gas. It’s a necessity of life. People can certainly afford to go tickets to a baseball game. Therefore, the Wilpons cannot just raise ticket prices however they want. There is a limit to how much people will pay for such diversions.
The Mets have already come out ahead with 10,000 less seats.
Huh? That’s just your guess/opinion. You have nothing to substantiate that with.
Even if they build those 10,000 extra seats, they won’t make as much money as they would without those 10,000 seats.
BS. Pure BS. They may or may not. It would depend on so many other factors which neither you or I are privvy to.
The thing that matters most is not just how many tickets sold. It’s how many tickets sold x price that matters.
You really think the Wilpon’s are going to make less revenue with citifield?? I really wish I could sign up for that bet..
Not when seats in the second level of Citi start at $75…
No, I do not think they will make less than what they made at Shea. But they will be forgoing additional revenue with the decreased capacity.
If the Mets could sell 4million year in and year out, then sure, they might be losing some revenue by having a smaller field. But this 4 million number is an aberration. Citifield is a long term financial plan, which will include some really crappy seasons, and in the long run, I’m sure the size of the stadium makes economic sense.
Not really… Just increase ticket prices to some season ticket holders by 150% and there is additional revenue…
More expensive concession options… See the club levels, see Blue Smoke and see Shake Shack…
The issue is not increased revenue which of course they will see .. the issue is of forgone revenue. Missed revenue. And you still didn’t explain how lower capacity equals more expensive concessions. That doesn’t make sense.
They made an economic decision to forget about the forgone revenue and instead focus more on cost reduction. It makes more sense this way in the long term.
It may make for sense to them if they are thinking small. Which is what they did. I think it’s unfortunate.
I think they are thinking more realistically than small. Attendance at baseball games is a number that varies greatly decasde to decade. Unless the Mets turn into some sort of dynasty with 30 straight winning seasons, this plan makes economic sense.
No attendance at baseball games in the U.S. has been going up as a whole decade by decade. It really doesn’t fluctuate much, but has been more a rising consistent trend.
The Mets do not have to turn into a dynasty in order to maintain high demand. I disagree.
Yeah, I’m sure they looked through budgets and plans and chose the plan that means less revenue. of course. That makes a ton of sense.
The Wilpons have made a lot of decisions concerning Citi Field based on nostalgia (Ebbetts field). Reportedly, capacity was one of them. It was kept down to also mimic the feel and look of Ebbetts field.
when you operate under capacity, in any venture, your spending money on operating costs that you do not need to spend, and thus you are throwing away money. Therefore, when building a new stadium, you would like to build it at a size that is optimal, meaning you want it at capacity every night. The Mets do not sell out 55,000 at Shea everynight. They probably average around 40 or so.
Yes, I have heard the Wilpons’ lower operating-building costs as their rationale. I understand that argument. But I do not believe it will entirely make up for the forgone revenue I think they would draw in the next decade had the stadium been built larger.
The Mets attendance has been steadily rising the last 4-5 years. I think it’s a trend that will likely continue and the new stadium does not fit current demand even though it will be sold out almost every game next year.
it will only continue if the Mets are a winning ballclub. When the Mets suck, not many people are willing to pony up the cash to watch them play. In sports, the revenue stream is not constant, therefore it would make more sense economically to approach it by reducing costs as much as possible.
count the games this season where the Mets sold more than Citifield’s capacity. I would have to guess that it is less than 15%
That’s thinking small. King George doesn’t think small.
I hate the Yankees as much as anyone. Probably more than most. But when it comes to pure business decisions, they are ahead of the Mets.
The mistake is thinking like a mediocre, inconsistent ballcub, whether or not you are.
Bobby, 4 million is already way over Citi Field’s capacity. Even if every game in the new stadium is sold out. Current demand exceeds the new supply.
the problem is current demand is most likely not sustainable. When making decisions like this, you have to view it from an historical perspective, and historically speaking, this year is a statistical anomoly.
The Yankees current demand has been running higher than the new capacity at Citi Field for many years. They can sustain higher demand but the Mets can’t?
That doesn’t make sense from a historical perspective either, as the Mets used to outdraw the Yankees regularly in the 60s and the 80s.
I think the Wilpons were thinking small here.
Free Heilman, can I ask what you do for a living? The reason I’m asking is that it seems to me you have no idea how supply and demand works. The Mets, unlike most for-profit companies, have the luxury of controlling supply without interference from regulator. The pricing chart does not function in a straight line where a 1% decrease in supply would result in a 1% increase in price. If anything, as you’ve seen with oil, a slight decrease in supply can cause a dramatic increase in price. What the Wilpons have done is similar. They have essentially gotten rid of 10,000 cheap seats so they can have the luxury of charging current-day playoff prices for the remaining 45,000 seats and they’re probably guranteed to make more money than a sellout at Shea even if the new stadium is half-filled. If those 10,000 seats were added, they’d probably need to sell 60-70% of the seats to ensure the same revenue as a Shea sellout.
Of course I understand supply and demand.
So, you’re telling me that 45,000 playoff priced seats makes more money than 45,000 plyoff-priced seats + 10,000 cheaper seats? Sorry, your math doesn’t compute.
I know, I know. You’re going to say that if there were 10,000 additional seats they wouldn’t be able to charge playoff prices for the other 45,000 seats. Well I disagree. Whatever they will be charging for those 45,000 seats they could probably still get even with a larger capacity.
As it is now, demand is far outstripping supply.
The issue isn’t whether revenue will exceed that of Shea. Of course it will due to higher prices everywhere (in-stadium advertising, parking, merchandising, restaurants, ticket prices etc etc) The issue is whether they are forgoing a large chunk of change by choosing to make the sentimental choice of a smaller stadium.
I think they’ve done that.
If the Mets sell out all of Citi Field’s seats, not including SRO next season it will be approximately 3.44 Million…
Some indications are they might not be SRO until after the All Star Break…