What if you had tickets to a Broadway show and the performance was canceled. Dead. Dark. Never happened. You’d expect a refund, right? A full refund.
Well Major League Baseball, which drew a near-record 79 million fans through stadium turnstiles in 2008, is once again squeezing the last dollar out of the public, only this scheme has nothing to do with exorbitant ticket prices. It has to do with the league’s onerous refund policy for games not played during the postseason.
Now I’m not knocking baseball. I’ve been a lifelong fan, and never miss a playoff series when it’s near me. But those business geniuses in baseball’s front office make the airline industry look generous by comparison. Here’s an example ...
As a Phillies fan, I entered a lottery on the club’s MLB Web site to
for the chance to buy tickets to a game. I was shut out for both the
Divisional Series, against the Brewers and, later, the League
Championship, versus the Dodgers.
Then on the day before the Phillies went for the clincher against the Dodgers in the best of seven series, I received an e-mail from the team, congratulating me on being selected to participate in a “second-chance” ticket drawing to a potential Game 7 at Citizens Bank Park, the Phillies’ home. Hmmm. Guess they must have had some seats they still needed to fill.
Of course, simple logic told me the chances of a Game 7 were remote since the Phillies had a 3-games-to-1 lead and need only one more win to advance to the World Series. Still, I found the offer almost too hard to resist. There were only a few hours to act before time ran out. Part of being a fan involves thinking with your heart rather than your head.
So I poked around the Phillies’ Web site (and those of the other participating teams) to explore my options if the game, in fact, wasn’t necessary. I was surprised, to say the least. If I wanted a refund credited to my charge card, I’d have to apply for it within seven days of the final game of the series. No problem there. But the $20 “order-processing fee” was another matter. This fee amounted to half the price of the ticket, in the cheap seats where I had a chance of sitting. And it was not refundable, even if the game never happened!
Now that was a problem.
“Are you kidding?” I asked a telephone service representative for the Phillies. “How can you justify a charging a fee if the game wasn’t played?
“We have nothing to do with it,” the rep said. “Major League Baseball makes us do it. The money goes to them.”
It was right about then that I began wondering how many other fans received that same e-mail and how many actually rolled the dice and bought tickets. Needless to say, there was no Game 7. And by the way, if you’re lucky enough to get a shot at any tickets to the series that started last night in Tampa, just watch out for any similar rip-offs.
Full disclosure: I’ll be at game #4 in Citizens Bank Park in Philadephia on Sunday anyway. I was lucky enough to score tickets in that lottery – and at least you know the fourth game will definitely be played!
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