Business

Yanks’ move on StubHub & fans is a wild pitch

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We all know that the Yankees have balls.

But the Bronx team’s desperate attempt to keep people who’ve already paid full price for tickets from selling those tickets to others — usually over the Internet and often at sharply reduced prices — might be called chutzpah by some.

I would just call it desperate.

I’ve been writing about Hal Steinbrenner’s fight with StubHub for more than a year.

In fact, I broke the news in this column that the feud between Steinbrenner, the Yanks’ managing general partner, and the rest of the front office, and StubHub, a ticket reseller, was going on.

At one point StubHub accused me of favoring the team; then Major League Baseball griped about my columns.

From that I assume my coverage has been a fastball right down the middle. Today I’ll put a little spin on it and tell you what I really think.

The dispute boils down to this: The Yankees are annoyed that fans were reselling their tickets for far less than face value. People could usually buy tickets for any game on an Internet ticket site like StubHub at a much lower price than the Yanks were charging at the box office.

So, naturally, the team’s sales were taking a hit.

For example, I recently purchased two tickets to each of three early-season Yankees games on StubHub — and the six tickets cost a total of around $35. And that included StubHub’s fees.

The tickets would have cost me about three times as much had I bought them directly from the team.

The Yankees fought back when StubHub refused to put a floor on the price of tickets resold on its site. A few months ago, the Yankees became one of only two MLB teams (out of 30) that bowed out of a long-standing deal with StubHub. They signed with rival Ticketmaster.

But the team couldn’t stop fans — typically season-ticket holders — from still listing their unwanted tickets for resale on StubHub.

And fans did, including the ones from whom I bought my cheap seats.

Under the old deal, StubHub had booths set up inside Yankee Stadium, right next to the regular ticket windows. There was even a button on Yankees.com where you could buy Yankees tickets at less than they would cost if you hit the regular ticket button.

After the Yanks pulled out of the deal MLB had with the ticket reseller, StubHub arranged to distribute its tickets from a storefront across from the Stadium.

Last week, the team went to court to stop that. Under New York state law, the tickets couldn’t be distributed by StubHub within 1,500 feet of the Stadium. The law was clearly written to keep people from scalping tickets at higher than the stated price — not for those looking to unload them at pennies on the dollar.

But a judge in Bronx Supreme Court sided with the home team, the Yankees, on that one, and a subsequent hearing yesterday was postponed.

In any event, StubHub, I’m told, is looking for another distribution site that’s outside the 1,500-foot statutory limit. It will probably put the ticket pickup site somewhere a little farther down 168th Street — big deal!

I feel a little sorry for Steinbrenner and the Yankees — a big new stadium, all those extra costs and unappreciative fans unloading thousands of tickets at prices that wouldn’t even get you a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

Clearly Steinbrenner and associates would love to go back to the days when fans didn’t have a way to save money — back before the Internet made the marketplace a lot more efficient, back to the days of, oh, say, Babe Ruth.

That’s really the solution to the Yankees’ dilemma — get another Bambino, or the modern-day equivalent. If the team became exciting again — if it put some strong bats in the lineup — then people wouldn’t want to dump their tickets.

If the Yanks had more bats, the team wouldn’t have to be so ballsy in court.

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Samsung introduced the Galaxy S4 cellphone, which lets a user scroll down, pause and start videos by just looking at the screen.

But why? Why do I need something like that? Maybe when my fingers stop working, but why now?

Give me a cellphone that tells me when my fly is unzipped and I’ll be impressed.