The economics of professional ticket scalping is interesting to me and I thought this dramatic drop in ticket prices was interesting. All the hype over the Cubs had tickets to their games reaching insane levels.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/ct-cubs-fans-tickets-wrigley-met-1021-20151021-story.htmlTickets to see the Chicago Cubs take on the New York Mets were expected to be the most expensive National League Championship Series tickets in the past five years, but the average price of a Game 3 ticket is down more than 57 percent, experts say.
The average ticket price for Tuesday's Game 3 at Wrigley Field was $526.28, according to TiqIQ.com, a website that aggregates ticket prices on the secondary market. After the Cubs triumphed over the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Division Series last week, tickets were listed at $1,233.01, TiqIQ spokesman Chris Matcovich said.
The drop may be in part because the Cubs trail the series 0-2, Matcovich said. However, there is typically a drop in ticket prices closer to the day of the event.
"This one is a bit more steep than normal," he said.
Some of the cheapest seats on resale sites were around $265, a 47 percent drop from the end of the NLDS.
The most expensive ticket was a club box seat listed at $1,900, Matcovich said.
Dozens of Cubs fans, like Joey Lipps, of the city's Lakeview neighborhood, lined up Tuesday afternoon outside the Wrigley Field box office in hopes of getting face value tickets after hearing the team had some left over.
"Once I heard that I got my (butt) over here," said Lipps, who also attended the wild-card game in Pittsburgh and an NLDS game in Chicago.
"Everybody and their mama wanted to get tickets, but once it became flooded with tickets, prices dropped."
Some are attributing the drop to the fact that the Cubs couldn't clinch at Wrigley after they dropped the first two games. Either way, it's nice to see scalpers get burned, since they're a big reason ticket prices are so unreasonable.