Ticket Prices, Transactions, T Shirts

Isn't it amazing? The season ends and we fans wait patiently for the hot stove to start heating up, only to tire very quickly when it feels like all the rumbling, grumblings, and rumors never actually come to fruition but are still reported and rehashed all the way to spring training. This year's Winter Meetings came and went, nothing happened, the Mets still don't have attractive prospects, or an ace pitcher. Bo-ring.


If you trusted new ticket prices as an indicator of offseason activity, though, you might swear that the Mets had found a way to acquire both Johan Santana and Erik Bedard in a three way trade while collectively giving up only Jorge Sosa, a personalized brick at CitiField, the choreography to a Jose Reyes home run dance, and 3 fungo bats.

I'm referring, of course, to the 20% increase in 2008 Shea Stadium ticket prices, announced by the Mets last week. Dave Howard, Mets' executive vice president of business operations, on the increase:

“We considered where we were in the marketplace. Our average ticket price is still the lowest among the nine major pro sports teams in the New York area. Our payroll is among the highest in baseball. We put our resources back into the team.”

Everyone else is doing it, and look, look, we just got Matt Wise!

So despite a collapse of epic proportions and marginal improvement (depending on how you see the Milledge trade, really) to the ballclub this winter, the Mets can still justify raising prices, further forcing the average fan and middle income family to watch from home.

Metsblog has a post today pointing out that at least 12 other teams are raising ticket prices by at least 15 percent for next year. So this seems like an across-the-board type thing, which is an excellent justification for the Mets raising ticket prices for 2008 in the face of an ugly 2007.

Everyone else is doing it!

Or it's just another depressing indictment of the power of money in sports right now. Sports has become such an enterprise, ESPN such a caricature of itself, that the Mets 5-year business model says it makes sense to raise prices this year, despite the fact in a real, ethical world still guided by a sense of right and wrong it's like rubbing salt on the still-open wounds of most Mets fans.

And Major League Baseball can continue making money out the wazoo while half of it's other teams raise their ticket prices, despite the fact that in a real, ethical world guided by a sense of right and wrong baseball should have it's tail much further between its legs in the wake of an investigative report that just named more than 60 of its current and former players as users of performance-enhancing drugs while also speaking to its own culpability in this whole mess.


There is no level-headed reasoning here. Raising ticket prices on Mets fans next year just isn't right. At least we'll be ready for CitiField.

***

20%, incidentally, is also the percentage of money I took home after fellow Knicks die-hard Ivan Cash and I stood outside Madison Square Garden Wednesday night selling t-shirts with a sound, socially-conscious message for the holidays:


Admittedly, the Knicks are my third team in New York. But it's a strong third. Watching fans pour in and out of Madison Square Garden on Wednesday - to watch a horrible team - only served as a strong reaffirmation that there's nothing in New York quite like when the Knicks are good. That underdog finals run in '99 remains at the top of my list of most cherished sports memories.

So Ivan and I stood outside the Garden, voices hoarse from shouting "love the franchise, hate the coach...with a hand-crafted, original t-shirt!," among other sales pitches, all in our own for-profit attempt to build further outrage toward the mess that is the New York Knickerbockers.

Ivan designed and printed these shirts himself, and at $20 apiece we sold all 30 shirts that we brought with us. It was a pretty good night. Even fans who didn't want a hand-crafted, original t-shirt signaled their support. ABC eyewitness news, CW11 news at 10, NBC, and a freelance writer for the New York Times all asked what brought us out to the main entrance of Madison Square Garden to voice our opposition to Isiah Thomas and the Knick regime.

Bad move after bad move, no defense, sexual harrassment, a franchise in disarray, no end in sight. That's what.

Earlier Wednesday, dozens of other fans gathered outside MSG to protest the state of the Knicks and sign a giant pink slip for Isiah, which also received attention from the local network news media. So perhaps "FI-RE I-SI-AH!" is finally reaching a critical mass.

We can only hope. In the meantime, hate the coach.

(Images courtesy sayhey.files.wordpress.com, cnn.com, ivancash.com)