Watching the ESPN game of the week last night, we couldn’t help joking about how the Giants had no problem filling seats behind home plate last night.  Of course, those folks paid for seat liscences on top of their season tickets, and those liscences in that area are about $7500 originally, so with that kind of investment, you probably are going to use those tickets.

The Giants were one of the first teams to allow fans to turn their tickets in for exchange for another game, too.  They figured out that it was more important for them to resell the tickets than for the seats to go empty or for Stubhub and other ticket re-sellers to be making a buck off of those seats, or for seats to go empty.  If you are a season ticket holder, you can exchange the tickets for no fee, and if the seats are sold, you receive a credit.  If you don’t have season tickets though, you are charged a small service charge for turning in the seats… one advantage of giving the team your money for seats up front.  It ends up being low risk if you don’t go to as many game as you thought you would.

Now, though, with the economy  in hard times, the Giants are looking at new way to make games affordable and make sure their ballpark is full.  Without Barry Bonds slugging home runs, and fewer players hitting balls into McCovey Cove the team is experiementing with a new kind of variable ticket pricing. In a very limtited number of sections, the team is using a computer program that can take into account, oppponent, day of the week, weather, and number of tickets sold and lower or raise prices accordingly.  Rather than the tiered pricing that many teams use to lower ticket prices months in advance, this system changes on a daily  basis, like air fares.  This Ken Belson story gives details.

My first thought was why would you buy season tickets anymore?  Season tickets allow the team to earn high interest rates on your money for months before the season begins, and give the team information about how much money they have to spend on players in advance.  They are the early indicators for where the teams budget will lie.  If fans stop buying them, teams budgets will go way down, even in bigger markets, because the amount of interest the team earns on those deposits decreases. But Belson’s article is very quick to point out this isn’t taking over the entire ballpark, its just taking over some very specific sections, where fans don’t seem to want to sit anyway.

The great news about this is that fathers and sons can once again pop into the ballpark and find an affordable seat.  It might be for some pitching match-ups that don’t mean too much, but magic can happen at any moment, in any game, so at least those kids are getting in the ballpark again. And the team has to like it because those folks still will buy some cokes and dogs; The seats will be full for the cameras, as well.

Its one more way to make baseball available, so hopefully, other teams will follow the Giants lead on this.  Leave it to California to be the front runners.