{"id":450662,"date":"2026-02-05T14:43:06","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T14:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/450662\/"},"modified":"2026-02-05T14:43:06","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T14:43:06","slug":"did-the-red-sox-actually-break-the-law-with-junk-ticketing-fees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/450662\/","title":{"rendered":"Did the Red Sox actually break the law with junk ticketing fees?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Red Sox fans Damon Campagna, Lily Rose Smith and Patrick Spaulding filed a class-action lawsuit<\/a> against the team in U.S. District Court, alleging that it charged illegal junk fees from at least 2022 through 2024 and used \u201cdrip pricing\u201d to inflate the stated costs for tickets. I believe them.<\/p>\n

To be clear, I believed them as soon as I saw the first headline about all this. As I am not a court of law, I am under no obligation to find the team innocent until proven guilty. I relish doing the opposite, in fact. I nonetheless read the criminal complaint. After doing so, I still believe them, but I am now angry.<\/p>\n

Advertisement<\/p>\n

To be clear, I am not just mad at the Red Sox, who in this writer\u2019s opinion are obviously guilty of the charges, and who stopped the scheme before last season likely because of its obvious illegality and\/or because the team was finally good enough, after a self-induced swoon, to render it unnecessary. I am also mad at myself for having paid junk fees like this over and over, having accepted it as the cost of doing business when holding bad actors accountable is at least theoretically possible.<\/p>\n

All of which is to say that the complaint is the extreme, uncut good stuff, and an incredible look at how the team allegedly squeezed money equally from high- and low-priced ticket buyers through what appears to be an algorithmic, inconsistently applied process. The plaintiffs claim there were two interrelated mechanisms at work: \u201cdrip-pricing,\u201d in which a good\u2019s full cost is slowly increased throughout the buying process, and \u201cjunk fees,\u201d which are exactly what they sound like and include absurdities like \u201cPer-Ticket Fees\u201d and \u201cOrder Fees.\u201d<\/p>\n

These practices differ insofar as legitimate fees (like taxes) can be used in a drip pricing scheme, but that\u2019s about it. It\u2019s really about the marriage of the two; specifically, it\u2019s about how the team allegedly leveraged \u201cdrip pricing\u201d to add variably priced \u201cPer-Ticket Fees\u201d and a flat, usually $7 \u201cOrder Fee\u201d to rip off buyers from the front row to the last. The Red Sox, naturally, did not comment on the suit, only saying that they team \u201calways follows the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good thing, then, that the complaint covers at least a portion of that silence up front, noting that \u201cthe team never even pretended that these fees covered anything of value to buyers independent of the tickets the buyers had already shown interest in purchasing.\u201d It also notes that \u201cPer-Ticket Fees\u201d varied depending on the price of the originally chosen seat \u2013 running from $.50 for cheaper options to $8.50 for more expensive ones \u2013 and the opponent, correctly saying that \u201cit does not cost the Red Sox more to issue a ticket to a game against the Yankees than to a game against the Brewers,\u201d despite the costs differing. It also takes on the \u201cOrder Fees,\u201d flatly stating that \u201cit does not cost the Red Sox $7 to process each\u201d transaction.<\/p>\n

Advertisement<\/p>\n

All told, the complaint alleges that if the team sold 2.5 million tickets per year with average junk fees of $4 per ticket, they\u2019d have pocketed $6 million in the event that only 20% of inventory was \u201ctainted\u201d this way. Given that the team happened to *coincidentally* close down sales at its Fenway Park box office in 2022 \u2013 where one could previously bypass \u201cOrder Fees\u201d \u2013 that number is likely far closer to 100% than 20% (my words) and \u201cthe actual damages are likely far in excess of that amount\u201d (theirs). The complaint says the team\u2019s actions constitute \u201cunfair or deceptive acts or practices\u201d under Massachusetts law.<\/p>\n

Putting aside the legal issue, anyone charging an \u201cOrder Fee\u201d for the convenience of buying a ticket online is theoretically acting amorally; perhaps it would be one thing for a struggling business to do it, but that doesn\u2019t describe the Red Sox. No matter how the court rules, the team is already guilty of being shitty to its fans. Not was \u2014 is. Two tickets to this year\u2019s April 6 game against the Brewers will run you $8.75 each in fees, which are ridiculous even if they are now stated up-front alongside the ostensible \u201cface value\u201d of the ticket. April 22nd against the Yankees? $11.75 each. You get the picture. The Sox have stopped hiding the fact they have extortionate pricing practices, but it doesn\u2019t make them virtuous.<\/p>\n

And yet, they\u2019re happy to do business this way, because they think it\u2019s the right way. Maybe it is. Their house, their rules, after all. I don\u2019t expect much will change going forward, but if they lose this lawsuit \u2013 and frankly, I don\u2019t know how they\u2019d win it \u2013 they\u2019ll just increase the up-front fees going forward to recoup the difference. They say you can\u2019t predict baseball, and in most cases they\u2019re right. This is the exception to the rule. Without legislation and enforcement, the Sox will continue to steal as much from us as they possibly can. It sucks!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, Red Sox fans Damon Campagna, Lily Rose Smith and Patrick Spaulding filed a class-action lawsuit against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":450663,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[32552,211444,363,28624,99,12404],"class_list":["post-450662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-drip-pricing","tag-junk-fees","tag-mlb","tag-red-sox","tag-sports","tag-yankees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}