MLB Attendance Problems

I’ve held silent for some time about the issues that have been ignored with ticketing to sporting events. If the actions by the teams involved in #WorldSeries2024 manipulated the stock market like they manipulate the ticketing market, people would be arrested.

MLB statement on this: We feel pretty good, honestly, because in this particular case it happened on Kalshi, not Polymarket — the official prediction market of Major League Baseball. Use promo code “CRISISPR” for a $50 credit on your first Polymarket bet!

ROB MANFRED: Hey Hal, we're in the middle of a coordinated propaganda campaign to try and convince an unwitting American public that baseball is not very profitable. Make sure you lay low, just for the next year or so HAL: Oh fuck

Buster Olney: MLB All-Star Game in a ‘fragile state’ awfulannouncing.com/mlb/buster-oln…

Why does consuming sports have to be the world’s biggest pain in the ass? To watch everything I enjoy, I now need YouTube TV, Paramount +, ESPN +, Amazon, Sunday Ticket, Peacock, Victory, and now whatever the hell BZZR is. Good lord make it stop.

It's very possible that V+ won't work out long-term but ... to jump to a platform that a minority owner is a partner that doesn't even have an app or smart tv hookup yet is ... sus. Then again, the lack of tv hookups or viable apps haven't stopped streaming companies before.

BREAKING: Rangers changing streaming platforms immediately. Here is everything you need to know dallasnews.com/sports/rangers…

@Ben_Baby Money. The answer is always money.

Can someone please explain why teams don’t put their games on free-to-air TV like they used to back in the day?

The biggest story in live entertainment isn't resale prices, it's face value prices. Year after year, the cost of buying a ticket directly from the source keeps climbing to record levels, making concerts and sporting events less affordable before a ticket is ever resold. While Ticketmaster makes it increasingly harder to purchase. Why do so many proposed ticketing laws ignore the one price every fan has to pay first?

My 81 yr old dad who has been around the game of baseball for 75 years at every level just called me to find out what channel the Home Run Derby was on? He doesn’t have @netflix like most people his age. Do better @MLB. #FireManfred

@TicketsData @joinautopilot Should have set off red flags, but with a company as corrupt as Stubhub, I don’t think they think many things through.

@ProblemsMlb @joinautopilot My assumption was the board of the company might think giving the CEO a 0% sell fee to a separate entity could set off some red flags.

StubHub's CEO has been scalping his own customers for years Eric Baker is the CEO of StubHub and he also built Andro Capital on the side, a hedge fund that acquires tickets and sells them on StubHub He also made sure Andro Capital got a better deal than every other seller on the platform: • Andro Capital: $0 in seller fees (2024-2025) • Everyone else: 20% commission In 2023, StubHub ended a deal where Andro Capital had been operating as an inside ticket inventory partner and paid Andro Capital $1,600,000 to do it He then created Colloquy Capital to finance other mass scalpers buying and flipping tickets on the same platform The Texas AG, Consumer Protection BC, and two class-action lawsuits are all investigating

@x6pnda @forcemm @ScottFriedman3 @FIFAcom @Ticketmaster @SeatGeek I don’t think that’s it, I think they just decided not to slash prices on their own site. They would get understandably dragged for that. Would rather pretend it’s scalpers selling for half price

@mlb @phillies I refuse to pay for a streaming service especially the woke Netflix for the privilege of watching home run derby!! MLB works for elites. Thanks for screwing over your fans. My Dad is 90 years old. He has no idea how to stream anything and lives on a fixed income. But you don’t care about your senior fans who have stood by you for decades. Shame on all of you and your greed!!

@TicketsData @joinautopilot Why would he charge seller fees on “his own” inventory? He was still getting buyer fees.

@joinautopilot 0% sell fee can’t be true

🚨Monday’s lawsuit claims that while @StubHub did give this information to regulators, it did not publicize it to ordinary ticket buyers. On the contrary, plaintiff Louis Sanquini says StubHub was advertised as a platform that “connects independent buyers and sellers” when he logged onto the website to buy tickets for a Kiss show at Madison Square Garden in 2023 and a New York Red Bulls soccer game in 2024. “Plaintiff and members of the proposed class purchased tickets on StubHub believing they were buying from individual fans through a neutral marketplace, when in fact StubHub’s own leadership has a direct financial stake in, and StubHub itself helps finance, the large-scale resale operations that supply much of the platform’s inventory,” reads Sanquini’s lawsuit. “Defendants’ failure to disclose this conflict of interest, while affirmatively marketing StubHub as a fan-to-fan marketplace, deceived plaintiff ℹ️@billboard

Stubhub marketplace is rife with massive scalping through a company owned by its CEO. cbc.ca/news/investiga…

Our players will also not be participating in the All-Star Game

Hey @FOXNashville, Nashville is @Braves country. Who is making the decision not to put the Braves on for the national game? And it’s insane that this game is impossible to watch in the city as a result of your choice. @mlb has to fix these blackout rules.

FIFA & Federations have been reselling World Cup tickets going back to before WC in Russia. They used to sell big blocks to brokers but now just sell directly on marketplaces. sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2026/…

The 5 reasons soccer won't increase in popularity after the world cup is over. 1. The flopping. This goes against the soul of every American. We value grit, toughness and basically not being a pussy. 2. The clock. No one wants to get to the end of a game and have no clue when it's over. Just stop & start the clock when you need to, like sane people. 3. Offsides. Just put a line out there like everyone else. This floating line you have makes the game unwatchable. It's like a built in, anti-excitement glitch you manufactured for your game. 4. Red cards. What a stupid rule that you automatically get kicked out for the next game for getting one. I can understand suspending someone after a league review of something you did that was horrible. But to automatically get suspended because of what a ref saw at full speed is stupid. 5. Ties. In America we call it kissing your sister, cause that's the same feeling you get after a tie. Pure disgust. In soccer, it seems like the result you prefer most. Play til you have a winner.