Will the Red Sox Raise Ticket Prices?

By Carol-Ann Rudy

Fans may have to shell out more beans in Beantown for Boston Red Sox games next year, if the team again decides to bump up ticket prices to take advantage of their World Series win, as the team did in 2004. Right now, the cost of an average seat at Fenway Park runs about $47 for a regular season game, the highest in Major League Baseball.

There's no official word of a ticket price increase, but following the 2004 victory, the team’s first in 86 years, ownership increased ticket prices about 7 percent, according to published reports. And historically, teams have hiked prices by about 8 percent following a World Series win, based on information from WCVB-TV in Boston.

Then again, Sox fans are used to high prices. Tickets to games are routinely some of the most-sought after on the secondary market, according to TicketNews’ exclusive weekly rankings. And, StubHub! reported that World Series tickets for the Fenway games this year sold for an average of $1,279, which was also the most expensive ticket during the playoffs. That may be justified, considering Fenway is the smallest park in baseball. By comparison, the National League’s World Series games in Denver averaged $927 per ticket on StubHub!

But the Sox management is not insensitive to the fans’ pocketbooks and takes families into consideration in their pricing. According to Henry Mahegan, Media Relations Assistant for the team, over the past five years the new ownership has worked hard at breaking down prices, each year shielding increasingly larger percentages of tickets from a price increase. The percentages have ranged from 49% for 2003 to 81.5% for 2007:

PERCENTAGE OF TICKETS REMAINING THE SAME
 2003: 49%
 2004: 51%
 2005: 57%
 2006: 70%
 2007: 81.5

That’s more than 30,000 tickets per game that remained the same price as 2006 this year. The range of seats includes the Pavilion Box, Loge Box, Right Field Box, Right Field Roof Box, Infield Grandstand, Outfield Grandstand, Bleachers, Upper Bleachers, and general standing room.

A look at the Sox tickets at Fenway on their website reveals that prices begin at $12 in the bleachers (not accounting for Standing Room tickets) to $312 for premium “dugout” seats. Green Monster seats and Right Field Roof Deck seats, both standing room only, run $30, with a $25 food credit per ticket included in the cost of a Roof Deck ticket.