Coming off an historic September collapse that left them out of the postseason for the second year in a row, the Boston Red Sox announced this week that they will not raise ticket prices for next season.
The team announced November 8 that, for the second time in four years, prices for tickets available to the public will remain unchanged. However, prices for premium seats bought through multi-year contracts may vary.
The highest face value for a single-game Red Sox ticket in 2012 will again be $165 for seats atop the Green Monster in left field at Fenway Park. The lowest-cost ticket is $12 for an upper bleacher seat.
In the team’s statement, Red Sox president and CEO Larry Lucchino referred to the “trying times” for Sox fans this past season as one of the reasons for the 2012 price freeze. The Red Sox also froze prices after the 2009 season.
The Red Sox had the highest average ticket price in baseball last season at $53.38. They also ranked first (at $339.01) in Team Marketing Report’s Fan Cost Index, which computes the cost of a going to a game for a family of four.
Red Sox tickets are consistently among the highest-priced on the secondary market, too.
The Red Sox price freeze is perhaps the first bit of good news for a fan base that watched the team blow a nine-game Wild Card lead and miss out on the postseason, after Boston went 7-20 in September.
The freefall led to the departures of manager Terry Francona and general manager Theo Epstein, who left to become team president of the Chicago Cubs.
Fenway, Major League Baseball’s oldest ballpark, will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2012. It also has MLB’s smallest maximum seating capacity (39,067), which has aided the Red Sox in continuing the sell-out streak of 711 games that began in 2003.
From 1977 to 1995, the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers established the longest sell-out streak (814 games) in all of North American professional sports.
