Starting this season—Opening Day: April 4—fans will no longer be able to use print-at-home tickets (PDF-style) to get into Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
Instead, fans going to games will need actual tickets, like official ones, or have them on their smartphones.
It's all about protecting against fraud, the team said. Wrote the Yankees in an email Monday:
"As the Yankees are continuously striving to implement technological advances to provide our fans with a ticketing experience that is unparalleled, convenient, safe and secure, the Yankees are excited to announce, as a complement to traditional hard stock paper tickets, the availability of mobile ticketing for the 2016 baseball season.
Print-at-home paper tickets (PDFs) are being discontinued so as to further combat fraud and counterfeiting of tickets associated with print-at-home paper tickets (PDFs). In addition to traditional hard stock paper tickets, the Yankees will be offering the opportunity for fans to receive mobile tickets on a fan's Smartphone. For more information on mobile ticketing, visit yankees.com/mobile."
This is obviously not about counterfeit tickets or protecting the customer. It's about the Yankees cornering the secondary market. This is about other people making money off them. Not being able to sell printable tickets on sites like StubHub hurts season ticket holders. It hurts the average fan who makes an impromptu decision to head up to the Bronx on a summer night to catch a game. It eliminates the opportunity to buy day-of-game tickets at their lowest price. The only people that stand to benefit from this are the Yankees and the raw, grassroots ticket scalper standing outside McDonalds wearing a old wool Yankees jacket in the middle of August. If you want to buy tickets the day of the game you're either going to have to buy them at face value from the team or at or above the price floor set by the Yankees Ticket Exchange. It sucks for everyone.
Is it going to result in more fans at the games? It might. It might not. A lot of those seats go unsold because people hold out hope and keep their tickets on sale until two hours before the game starts and then nobody buys them. Now there's a little more pressure on them to get those tickets sold ahead of time. But you're still going to see a trillion empty seats at first pitch. Between Studio 54 underneath the legends seats, the new metal detector protocol and these newfangled telephone tickets I wouldn't count on every fan reaching their seat until about the fifth inning.
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