Yankees Will No Longer Accept Print-At-Home Tickets, Thus Screwing Their Fans

Here’s some bullshit that the Yankees just added to their ticketing policies:

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.

Mobile ticketing is a completely voluntary, opt-in feature. All season ticket licensees and group ticket buyers will automatically receive traditional hard stock paper tickets. For fans purchasing individual game tickets online at yankees.com, Ticketmaster.com, or via Ticketmaster telephone, you will have the option of receiving traditional hard stock paper tickets or mobile tickets at the time of initial purchase. Fans purchasing individual game tickets at the Yankee Stadium Ticket Office or at Yankees Clubhouse Shops will receive only traditional hard stock paper tickets (and will not have an option to receive mobile tickets or the option to convert their tickets to mobile tickets). Print-at-home paper tickets (PDFs) will no longer be available.

The Yankees would have you believe that eliminating print-at-home tickets is entirely motivated by a desire to prevent fraud, but the reality is that it has everything to do with the team’s partnership with Ticketmaster and ongoing war against StubHub.

When ticket resellers use StubHub, they can sell the ticket for as little as they’d like, but Ticketmaster sets artificial price floors that prevent sellers from listing tickets below face value. This practice has recently been called out by the New York Attorney General, as it deprives fans the opportunity to buy tickets on a fair market.

The Yankees’ wish to avoid the realities of supply and demand is the reason the team touts Ticketmaster as its official resale partner, and this new anti-PDF policy is a blatant attempt at further undercutting StubHub. The Yankees can’t force anyone to use Ticketmaster instead of StubHub, but it can make using the latter a much bigger pain in the ass by eliminating printable tickets.

Say you’re a Yankees fan, and you decide you want to duck out of work early and go to a shitty Twins-Yankees game on a Wednesday afternoon in August. There are tickets available for $19 on StubHub, but they are selling for face value on Ticketmaster, which will deliver an electronic ticket to your phone. You can’t get in with a PDF ticket, so unless you can figure out a way to get the StubHub seller’s physical tickets in your hands within a few hours, you’re stuck paying full price on Ticketmaster. You’ve been boned.

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