No wonder it’s named after a bank – Met fans are going to have to open up their safe-deposit boxes to afford seats at Citi Field next season.
The choicest seats will cost $495 – a 79 percent increase. That price, up from the $276 for comparable seats at Shea Stadium this year, also includes food and nonalcoholic drinks. And some season-ticket holders are facing upwards of a 150 percent price hike for their ducats.
Despite the bump, all the most expensive tickets for next year have already been sold.
Fans scrambling to pay more for a seat in the new $800 million stadium will have to contend with the fact that it holds 15,000 fewer people than Shea – 42,500 instead of 57,365.
“Demand is going to be high, especially in the first few years,” said team Vice President Dave Howard.
“The fact that it’s a smaller ballpark will stimulate the urgency to buy the tickets early. You’re going to see the secondary market [such as stubhub.com] become more popular.”
On the lower level, where tickets at Shea were an average of $77 to $85 – depending on the opponent, day of the week and the Mets’ five-tiered pricing system – comparable seats at Citi Field will average $150 to $225.
At least one season-ticket holder saw his ticket price nearly triple.
Dan O’Neil, an Upper West Side paralegal who’s a diehard Met fan, paid $7,447 for two loge-level season seats at Shea last year, but received a letter from the team on Friday saying the equivalent seats at Citi Field would cost a whopping $18,630.
“I knew they were going to go up, I was thinking about $10,000 [for the two], which would have been fine, but they went out of completely control,” he told The Post.
“I spoke to the guy [the season-ticket liaison]. He said, ‘We gotta compete with the Yankees, we gotta compete with all the other teams.’ ” said O’Neil.
“Well, I’ve been a Mets fan my whole life, but I was like, the Yankees have won 26 World Series, I’m sure they can justify it. You guys won two and had the biggest collapse of all time last season.”
It’s true, Yankee fans have it much worse. At the new $1.3 billion Yankee Stadium, which will seat 52,325, the Legends Field Suite seats ringing home plate go for $500 to $2,500, up from $250 to $1,000 for the comparable tickets this year.
Howard said the Mets have spoken to about 3,000 season-ticket holders about relocation, and hope to reach about 3,000 more by the end of next month. The Mets are requiring 10 percent deposits for next year.
They also want full payment by November, a change from the past, when the money wasn’t required until just a month or so before spring training.
Michael Bakal, 27, of Baldwin, LI, hanging out at Virgil’s in Midtown, expressed the frustration of many a Met fan.
“It costs more to put gas in the car, or to take the train, and now it costs more to get a seat in a stadium that we paid to build,” Bakal said. “It’s kind of insulting to New Yorkers. Go find the money somewhere else. Give us a break, leave Joe Public alone.”
Additional reporting by Bart Hubbuch in Washington, Erin Calabrese in New York and Post Wire Services