Sacramento Season Ticket “Sell Out” Provides More Questions Than Answers
In this morning’s Chronicle comes news that the A’s have sold all the season tickets they put on sale for their new current home at Sutter Health Park. But little is known as to what this actually means. Reportedly, single game tickets will go on sale next week at which time perhaps more will become known. But for now...
What We Know
Sutter Health Park has 10,000 seats and an outfield “berm” (grassy lawn) that brings attendance capacity to 14,000. Presumably, season tickets are limited to actual seats meaning no more than 10,000 could be sold.
What We Don’t Know
Pretty much everything else...
- The A’s declined to state how many season tickets they have sold, preferring to leave it at “all the ones we wanted to” without clarifying whether that was 1,000 seats, 5,000 seats, 9,950 seats, or 10,000 seats. So it is completely unknown how many of the 10,000 seats can be purchased for a single game by fans who are not season ticket holders.
- Prices for the individual game tickets have not been disclosed, nor has it been mentioned in which sections tickets will be available.
- We don’t know how fans will wind up buying individual game tickets. The difference between selling 4,000 season tickets and selling 9,000 season tickets is that in the latter scenario fans wishing to buy individual game tickets will almost certainly have to do so through a Stub Hub type of site and not directly, as most available tickets will be season tickets being re-sold.
- The article begins by claiming “The Athletics should expect to play in front of packed houses at Sutter Health Park this season.” But we don’t know who has purchased these season tickets, individual fans who intend to spend much of their summer watching the A’s, or local businesses buying up seats that will sit empty much of the time. Paid attendance and physical attendance are two very different things.
In summary, today’s news is limited to “The A’s say they put an unknown number of season tickets on sale and that an unknown demographic has purchased them for an unknown price.” Big news indeed.
Now I know what the most popular reply to all this will be. “Screw the A’s for moving out of Oakland, I’m never going to a game in Sacramento anyway so who cares?” I do not happen to be one of those people, however, as I am tentatively planning to buy tickets for the second home game and take the 75 minute or so drive up to West Sacramento during my spring break.
Which means that next week I will be checking out the situation with regard to individual game tickets and making a decision as to whether they are priced in a way that still piques my interest. Assuming, of course, I can get a ticket — no matter how you slice it there are not going to be many available thanks to the whole “not a big league venue” clusterf***apalooza.
Stay tuned...