OnlyBucs

I was looking into buying some Yankee tickets for my wife and I in Sept vs. Baltimore - she's a big Yankee fan.

$900.00 each for seats between home plate and 1B, 4 rows from the field.



Hey, we want to have a huge payroll, right? How many of us would be willing to shell out $900.00 a seat for every Pirate home game? :-/

It's not that the fans are cheap, it's that Pittsburgh isn't as rich as NY.



If I were a billionaire, I would pay that much. If I could expense it for my hedge fund or Fortune 500 company, I would. Those, and a substantial number of multi millionaires are the ones in those seats.



Pittsburgh doesn't have a lot of billionaires. And it has just a fraction of the major companies and millionaires that New York does. There's not enough money in the city to get people to pay those prices.

012E39382E3220284B0 wrote: I was looking into buying some Yankee tickets for my wife and I in Sept vs. Baltimore - she's a big Yankee fan.

$900.00 each for seats between home plate and 1B, 4 rows from the field.



Hey, we want to have a huge payroll, right? How many of us would be willing to shell out $900.00 a seat for every Pirate home game? :-/


Ok, where to begin?

1. Yankee prices are hardly representative of MLB ticket prices.

2. All Yankees seats are not $900. Their average ticket price is $106 which is 2nd only to the Cubs ($150).

3. No one is asking the Pirates to have a huge payroll like the Yankees.

4. The Pirates have the 7th highest average ticket price ($76) but rank 23rd of 30 teams in payroll.

5. In MLB payroll, the 2 middling teams (#14, 15) are St.L. and Colorado. Teams between them and the Pirates in payroll are Astros, Indians, Braves, Twins, Phillies and Marlins. So just comparing Pirates to those teams, the Bucs have a lower payroll than all of them but higher ticket prices than all except Braves.



Therefore, it hardly seems the Pirates need to charge $900 for every seat just to become a middle of the pack team in terms of payroll.



http://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/



https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozania ... 8d61af294a

Is there a website anywhere that doesn't just show payroll year by year, but that totals it over 3/5/7/10 years? It's sensible to be in the bottom third sometimes, but if other clubs just visit the bottom third while you stay there it's probably a problem.

172438393A320439223E2522333F38560 wrote: Is there a website anywhere that doesn't just show payroll year by year, but that totals it over 3/5/7/10 years?  It's sensible to be in the bottom third sometimes, but if other clubs just visit the bottom third while you stay there it's probably a problem.
This one doesn't total it over the years but lists payrolls for the past 20 years so you can see who is in the bottom third consistently and who isn't.

http://www.stevetheump.com/Payrolls.htm

61524E4F4C44724F5448535445494E200 wrote: Is there a website anywhere that doesn't just show payroll year by year, but that totals it over 3/5/7/10 years?  It's sensible to be in the bottom third sometimes, but if other clubs just visit the bottom third while you stay there it's probably a problem.


Baseball Cube offers a sortable payroll history table for all teams over the last decade plus.

7552597A370 wrote:



Baseball Cube offers a sortable payroll history table for all teams over the last decade plus.


Thank you. Looks like they're 26th* over 3 years, including this year, and 28th over the last 10 and 15 years, with only the Florida teams below them.



*Ahead of Miami, Arizona, Oakland, Milwaukee, Tampa.

00332F2E2D25132E3529323524282F410 wrote:



Baseball Cube offers a sortable payroll history table for all teams over the last decade plus.


Thank you. Looks like they're 26th* over 3 years, including this year, and 28th over the last 10 and 15 years, with only the Florida teams below them.



*Ahead of Miami, Arizona, Oakland, Milwaukee, Tampa. 
Certainly looks like a pattern there. Of course a case could be made that they always have a young roster with no players making too much. But that's only because they maintain that status by moving the veterans who could make more. So there's a never a time when they transition from a low payroll to an average payroll. So they always have financial flexibility to do what exactly? To only add players in conjunction with moving enough players to maintain that perennially low payroll? To buy enough bobble heads so that the fans won't focus on their last championship being in 1979?

7D524544524E5C54370 wrote: I was looking into buying some Yankee tickets for my wife and I in Sept vs. Baltimore - she's a big Yankee fan.

$900.00 each for seats between home plate and 1B, 4 rows from the field.



Hey, we want to have a huge payroll, right? How many of us would be willing to shell out $900.00 a seat for every Pirate home game? :-






The Yanks created a lot of controversy when they opened New Yankee Stadium with this unheard of premium for the seats you're considering. it was considered robbery from the beginning, even in NY, and those tix often went unsold.



I don't know if $900 is where they started when the stadium first opened, but the fact you can apparently buy those tickets direct from the ticket office (i.e., those best seats aren't owned by deep pocket season ticket owners) tells me that even in NY there is a very limited market for a $900 seat.



Even still, as others have stated, you can't compare the NY market to any other market, not just Pittsburgh.

5A5D4B434D5A1D11684F45494144064B4745280 wrote: I was looking into buying some Yankee tickets for my wife and I in Sept vs. Baltimore - she's a big Yankee fan.

$900.00 each for seats between home plate and 1B, 4 rows from the field.



Hey, we want to have a huge payroll, right? How many of us would be willing to shell out $900.00 a seat for every Pirate home game? :-






The Yanks created a lot of controversy when they opened New Yankee Stadium with this unheard of premium for the seats you're considering. it was considered robbery from the beginning, even in NY, and those tix often went unsold.



I don't know if $900 is where they started when the stadium first opened, but the fact you can apparently buy those tickets direct from the ticket office (i.e., those best seats aren't owned by deep pocket season ticket owners) tells me that even in NY there is a very limited market for a $900 seat.



Even still, as others have stated, you can't compare the NY market to any other market, not just Pittsburgh.






Probably true, but I bet that they sell as many or more of those $900 tickets as the Pirates sell the $200 Lexus Club seats.