When it comes to baseball’s efforts to capture younger audiences, season tickets usually aren’t top of mind. But at the same time the league is working on creating a new streaming package for viewers at home or on the go, teams are finding new ways to sell the in-stadium experience, too — in the likeness of ClassPass, HotelTonight and Netflix.
In the age of StubHub and SeatGeek, where you can decide to go to pretty much any event at the last minute, people have less incentive to buy season tickets than they once did. That’s a problem for teams. As MLB commissioner Rob Manfred put it a few years ago: “When you have 2,430 (games) that you’re going to sell, we can’t be a one-ticket-at-a-time business.”
“Consumer habits are obviously changing, and teams are changing their offerings to adapt to that,” said Oliver Marvin, director of revenue strategy at SeatGeek. “You’re starting to see teams lean more into not just thinking about it as a season ticket, but like a season membership, where there’s more perks that go above and beyond the ticket and the in-venue experience, and make it a bit more personalized and bespoke.
“But then you’re starting to see other buckets of inventory that teams are making available to capture consumers who want more flexibility, who don’t want that long-term commitment. And that can be at the lowest level of commitment, making primary single tickets available. And then there’s going to be in between … you’ll see a lot of themed packages that will target different demographics and cohorts.”
Some will always be partial to classic full- or partial-season plans. Businesses want to entertain clients, and some fans want to keep the same seat in the same section.
“Traditional season tickets are still our lifeblood, and I think they will be for a long time,” said Jason Hartlund, chief commercial officer for the Brewers. “But as we’re trying to tap into a younger, more diverse demographic, folks that spend a lot more time on their phone or on their tablet, the flexibility and the ability not to be committed to every game we think might be attractive. “
(Bailey Orr/Texas Rangers/Getty Images)
The idea of a subscription itself isn’t brand new. In 2017, several teams started to offer a “Ballpark Pass,” which still exists today in varying forms. Last season, 13 teams, or close to half the league, offered subscription-style plans: the Astros, Brewers, Blue Jays, Cardinals, Diamondbacks, Mets, Nationals, Orioles, Phillies, Pirates, Royals, Twins and Yankees.
Last year, a pass entailed a monthly fee ranging from $24.99 to $75, depending on the team, and provided access to the stadium in either a regular seat or standing room. (The Yankees changed their pricing depending on the month, while the Nationals offered only a full-season option at $405.)
Those who have signed up in Milwaukee for their “Ballpark Pass Plus” have been “significantly younger relative to our traditional season seat holders,” Hartlund said.
“Medium-size markets like Milwaukee, we need to just be a little scrappier,” he said. “If you’re in a market with seven, eight, nine million people, there’s probably enough of a population where 40-game plans and full-season plans make sense. But for us, we just have to get creative.”
Teams are now starting to take subscriptions a step further, expanding their offerings. It’s not that front offices didn’t want to before, but the ability to implement new offerings — and in some cases, the bravery to try them — was lacking. When the Oakland A’s tried a bold program in 2019 called A’s Access, they realized they needed to hire more associates to make it work.
“We’ve had these ideas, but maybe we didn’t have quite the technology to actually make it work the way we want — how am I going to go about this?” said Kenny Farrell, the senior vice president of marketing and analytics for the Arizona Diamondbacks. “Years ago, we used to give people paper vouchers and tell them to bring the paper vouchers back to the window. I mean, it didn’t seem insane then — it sounds crazy today. In the 2010s probably, we were still doing things like that.”
Two developments are working now to push offerings to new places. One is the environment after the arrival of COVID-19.
“There really is an inflection point here that’s been driven by the pandemic in the need to get new, younger fans into the database and product ecosystem,” said Aaron Holland, CEO at Season Share. “It’s never been more compelling to stay at home.”
The other is the rise of companies like Season Share and FanRally. Season Share began as a platform for people to divvy up their season tickets, but pivoted in 2020 and now offers several ticketing options.
“One is a pass product, which is where we overlap with (FanRally), although the product itself is executed very differently, that is similar to the Ballpark Pass,” Holland said. “You have access to the game, but you don’t know where your seat location is going to be. … Think about ClassPass, HotelTonight, these things that give these businesses a way to leverage unsold inventory in a way that doesn’t degrade or cannibalize their existing inventory.”
Season Share also has “flow” products, which are often used for last-minute ticket offers. The Diamondbacks, for example, use those to power their “Summer Pass” offering at three months for $99.
“We help teams sell more primary inventory, and identify those fans who may be season ticket holders in the future,” Holland said. “And we’ve had many teams who activate our products, and then make a direct sales approach at our buyers to try to move them up the ladder into full season tickets.”
Holland thinks the future might lie with bundles beyond just baseball games, and is planning to launch a new product this summer in that vein.
“Last year in the NBA, the Utah Jazz rolled out their Jazz Fan Pass,” Holland said. “They were bundling basketball alongside live events, concerts, comedy and baseball. … As a consumer, especially a younger consumer, we think that fans will subscribe to a central market-based product.”
The Astros and Brewers, meanwhile, have FanRally power their passes. FanRally can handle a variety of models, but CEO Chris Giles believes in one that makes reselling tickets more difficult, thereby returning some of the revenue resellers typically pocket to the teams themselves.
In his time as the COO of the A’s, Giles led the charge on A’s Access, which remains perhaps the most famous attempt to rethink season tickets to date. It was Ballpark Pass on steroids, because it was instituted in place of the old season-ticket model — not just as an alternative.
“I think even today, most team executives know, it’s a bad model,” Giles said of traditional season tickets. “But unless there’s significant evidence for the replacement model, it’s a tough Band-Aid to rip, right? It could be 70, 80 percent of your total ticket revenues.”
A’s Access plans in 2019 started at $240 and included perks such as discounts on concessions, parking and merchandise, as well as ticket upgrade opportunities.
“We haven’t grown season tickets in a really long time,” Giles said. “We didn’t really have any insight into what was happening with the season tickets, because you sell them in these big bundles to one person. And what you figure out once you dive in is, no one goes to 81 baseball games. They either have one model, which is they have a bunch of share partners. … As the team, you only have relationships with that main account holder, and you really don’t have any visibility into what happens to it. The other (model) is, is they go and they sell all of their unwanted seats on a resale marketplace.”
The season-ticket holder age was in the upper 50s, Giles said, with few members below 35.
“What are consumers of our target age bracket doing?” Giles said. “They were subscribing to services, as opposed to buying products.”
The idea garnered plenty of media attention, and was in some ways successful. In July 2019, the team said new season-ticket holders were on average 11 years younger, with 9,535 new members.
Giles said the club made almost $9 million in new membership revenue. But the program was difficult to manage without the proper software, and perhaps more importantly, Giles said, “we cannibalized the heck out of our single-game tickets.” The team had no way of controlling what people did with the seats, and single-game revenue wound up down “by about the same amount.”
A’s Access was slated to continue for the 2020 season, but did not return post-pandemic. Giles left the team. Oakland president Dave Kaval did not return a call from The Athletic.
Enter FanRally, where Giles thinks he’s solved some of the problems he found with A’s Access, including resale.
“Our software allows the member to go in reserve seats,” Giles said. “And the way that the pass works is modeled after the original Netflix DVD business model. So if you have a pass, you can’t go in and just book all 81 games because you have access to 81 games. We actually cap the number of simultaneous reservations that each member can hold. … What that does is it allows the consumer to actually gamify and optimize games that they get. So if you want better seats, you need to book earlier.
“Very similar to the way you book an airline seat. You can go on, you can see all the available inventory, you can change your seats anytime you want. You can upgrade to better seats, but you can’t resell.”
One minor-league team, the Wichita Wind Surge (the Double-A affiliate of the Twins), is still offering season tickets to those who inquire, but the team is heavily pushing a FanRally membership plan. It’s A’s Access 2.0, or just shy of it.
“We were trying to look for a way to where on a bigger night, we’d have a platform that would have the ability to help us utilize seats in the best areas,” said the team’s general manager, Bob Moulette. “Residential season ticket holders in traditional places don’t get to go to all their games.”
Moulette went to college with Giles, but said the team was going down this road even if the two hadn’t reconnected.
The question from here will be one of demand. Although it’s gotten easier for teams to introduce new plans, will they grow more popular as younger generations age?
Teams today mostly use passes as supplements, creating a mishmash of offerings to capture different demographics. D-backs Summer Pass (37 games) and D-backs Student Pass (32 games) made up a little over 7 percent of the team’s total attendance in 2022, Farrell said. But over time, those numbers could shift further.
“There is no there there, right?” Farrell said. “We’re never there. Whether it’s a shift towards more social spaces and ballparks from a macro-level, building-structures perspective, or other types of new seating products, new ticketing products, I think we have to continue to be constantly innovative. Our goal as the team is to just make sure we’re listening.”
(Top photo: Jeffrey Phelps / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
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