Ticketmaster is vying to replace StubHub as the site where fans can officially resell their Major League Baseball tickets.
The contract between MLB Advanced Media and StubHub is coming up for renewal, and, as I mentioned in previous columns, some teams are very unhappy with the old deal.
Nobody involved in the talks was eager to discuss this subject with me. But since I’m tired of writing just about politics and the economy, I decided to put together the pieces of this puzzle.
And what it looks like is an intriguing brawl between new commerce and old — teams that want their tickets sold at the highest price versus fans who want discounts.
The Yankees and the Los Angeles Angels, I’m told, are the two teams most dissatisfied by the StubHub contract — and it’s not surprising. Despite being in a heated pennant race, Yankees tickets would fit nicely on the dollar menu at McDonald’s.
Tickets for tonight’s game against the Toronto Blue Jays can be purchased on StubHub for between $1 and $3. That’s well below box-office prices.
Even after you add on $10.45 in service charges (which apply to the entire order, not each ticket), seats acquired through StubHub are still much cheaper than those bought at the stadium box office or on Yankees.com.
And that has the Yanks seething.
The Boston series a couple of weeks from now is only a little better, with many seats listed at under $10. That’s less than the price of a beer at the Stadium.
Boston is out of the pennant race, but the series still has appeal because the Red Sox could act as spoilers to the Yanks.
The Yankees have been pressuring StubHub to place a minimum price at which people can resell the tickets, but that request is being denied. Even if the Yankees got what they wanted, there is still no way of preventing ticket holders from going onto StubHub on their own — or another site like Craigslist — and dumping their ducats at rock-bottom prices.
The Yankees have threatened to start their own official resale site, but sources say they couldn’t go it alone. And MLB probably doesn’t have enough time to develop a private site for all the teams.
So it’s likely going to be Ticketmaster or StubHub again, with teams being given some flexibility.
What will likely happen is this: MLB will sign with either StubHub or Ticketmaster and then let teams opt out. If StubHub wins a contract renewal, for instance, the Yankees could still decide to make Ticketmaster their official re-seller.
Ticketmaster, which already has deals with the NFL and the NBA, doesn’t like price floors either, so that might irk the Bombers.
The basic problem in baseball is supply and demand: too many games and too many seats. Brokers, in particular, can buy season tickets and recoup their investment on just a few key games. Broker tickets for lesser games can be —and are — dumped on the resale market at very low prices.
For the record, I like the idea of buying cheap seats, even if they are in the upper deck, also known as the Real Fan Section. This way, I don’t feel bad if the rain causes me to eat my $10 investment for two seats.
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Wall Street and the Obama administration got Quantitative Easing 3, and now we are all going to have to deal with it. Policy like that can’t be easily put back in its cage if it starts misbehaving.
The Federal Reserve, as you know, delivered an open-ended round of stimulus last week, just like the European Central Bank did on its bankrupt continent a while back.
So what have been the results so far? Oil prices are nearly $100 a barrel again, and gasoline is soaring, with the average price of a gallon closing in on $4 throughout the country.
It’ll be $6 if there is any kind of pickup in demand.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil supplier, says it’s puzzled at how prices can be rising so quickly when there’s so much fuel around.
Well, here’s why: Ben Bernanke has decided to take all the chains off his Frankenstein monster and create endless amounts of money.
So investors, realizing that the dollar here and the euro over there could soon become worthless, are moving into tangible assets like oil, gas and other commodities.
Inflation is already at the official uppermost limit of the Fed’s tolerance (although Bernanke is kind of forgiving when it comes to price increases).
The Labor Department announced that consumer prices rose 0.6 percent, mostly because of fuel prices. That’s the highest rise in consumer prices since June 2009.
Even the 0.6 percent increase is questionable, since the rising level of rents and food prices don’t seem adequately accounted for.
The most shocking thing is that prices are rising so steadily at the same time that the economy is stone-cold dead. In fact, the Economic Cycle Research Institute, which is particularly influential with the Fed, thinks we entered a new recession in the past couple of months.