Thw World Series logo is placed near home plate as fround crews at the Rogers Centre prepare the field on Thursday.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The dream kept getting better.
Already buzzing from the Springer dinger that sent the Blue Jays to the World Series, premium ticket holders were treated to a classy surprise on Monday night. After the on-field trophy celebration, people with elite seats were invited to a champagne celebration inside the Banner Club, where season tickets can now cost $13,000 each.
It wasn’t the same spray-it-everywhere party that players and coaches celebrate with, but it was a nice, unexpected touch – the kind of thing that Bay Street loves. Plus, white-glove treatment makes it easier to stomach ever-rising premium ticket prices. Treating a client to that? Priceless.
Yet there was barely time to recover from the euphoria because World Series tickets went on sale the next morning at 10 a.m., and they triggered Bay Street’s version of a moral dilemma. –
While the American League Championship Series was special, the World Series is next level, and everyone and their mother wants to go. Do you hold onto TD Lounge, KPMG Blueprint Club or Rogers Banner Club tickets, knowing you could flip a pair for $15,000 effortlessly? (Someone from the Blueprint Club did right away.)
Or if you’re away this weekend, but have been personally paying for seats for years, do you gift them to a client, or perhaps a die-hard fan who would never be able to afford to attend, or do you let your kids go? (A number of kids are lucking out.)
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And if you don’t have tickets, but know a client who would really, really like them, should you splurge, or will the cost exceed the client’s gifting policies, preventing them from accepting? (Occasionally, Bay Street does have rules. The same issue came up when Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was in town last year.)
The only party that wasn’t fretting: The Toronto Blue Jays. The team and their owner, Rogers Communications Inc., shelled out $400-million to renovate their 36-year-old stadium and the team’s chief executive also estimated they’d lost around $200-million during two seasons early in the COVID-19 pandemic: 2020 and 2021. The World Series is their golden ticket to cash in by selling access to all the premium clubs and suites they’ve added over the past three years. There’s also a new lounge, the Home Plate Terrace Club, that opens next year, and tickets for that start at $20,000 each.
No one interviewed for this story could go on the record. Formally, they don’t have approval from their firms. But as one lawyer put it, it was also out of fear of looking like a “douche bag,” or someone who crassly flaunts their wealth.
Yet by midweek any guilt from spending frivolously seemed to be wearing off. Some people are going all in and, in Bay Street style, trying to arbitrage the World Series – that is, earn a risk-free profit.
The play: Sell elite Toronto tickets, fly to Los Angeles on Monday or Tuesday morning, and buy secondary market tickets there. L.A. tickets are also pricey, with outfield seats going for around $1,600 (Canadian) each as of Friday, but the $15,000 made from selling two seats for one game in Toronto would easily cover them, the flight (about $1,300 from Toronto, if booked earlier this week), and a hotel.
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“Do the actuarial math,” the same lawyer put it. If you’re middle-aged, “you likely won’t see another World Series.” That, or it’s a midlife crisis.
In fact, there’s so much euphoria on Bay Street that some premium ticket and suite holders are now willing to forgive the Jays for so many price increases. Season ticket costs vary from premium club to premium club – and then they vary by row within each club – but one person’s Blueprint Club tickets, which are close to home plate on the first base side and come with a buffet dinner (but no alcohol) jumped from around $6,500 per season pre-renovation to about $17,000 this year (that’s before playoff and World Series tickets.)
Whenever fans complained about rising prices, the Jays used to say, “Take them now or you’ll never get them again,” the ticket holder explained. Because the increases were so steep, it sometimes took being a die-hard baseball fan to stomach the cost.
That’s partly because baseball season tickets are a lot to swallow. The regular season has 81 home games, about double that of the NHL and the NBA, and during the summer months when vacations and cottage time take precedence, it can be annoying to continuously sell tickets on the secondary market or find clients who want them.
But now that Bay Street is scrambling to find tickets for arguably the hottest event since Taylor Swift was in town, these ticket holders are the belles of the ball. “Those of us who bit the bullet are pretty happy about it now,” one source confessed.
They can also get a good laugh out of it. “It was crickets in terms of demand for tickets at the start of the season,” another corporate ticket holder explained by e-mail, “and now everyone thinks they can take us up on offers from months ago – LOL.”