With the All Star Game coming to Citi Field this coming season, I figured I'd make every good effort to make it there, too. I'd renewed my 15-game plan last Summer with an eye to getting first crack at tickets, which apparently were only available in "strips" that included tickets to the All Star Fanfest at the Javits Center (which I attended in 2008 and mostly enjoyed), the All Star Sunday festivities (Futures Game, Celebrity Softball), the Home Run Derby and, of course, the game itself on Tuesday. It seemed like a whole lot of crotch-grabbing just to get a ticket, but, nonetheless, I figured if nothing else I could sell off the Sunday and Monday tickets and just go to the game.
You know, provided I could afford the tickets in the first place. This was no guarantee. My fear was that the tickets would prove so prohibitively expensive that I wouldn't be able to get them in the first place. I scoured around the internet to see how much tickets to the 2012 All Star Game in Kansas City cost, but I couldn't really find anything. I know that the Mets had little control over how much tickets would cost, but the first bad sign I'd heard was about a month or so ago when, while listening to WFAN as is my wont, I heard someone mention that when MLB and the Mets were setting the pricing scale for the game, the prices were set "at the high end" of the spectrum.
Still, I figured they couldn't cost THAT much. I've been to NLDS and NLCS games, and those tickets are priced by MLB (at least I believe they are), and started at $45 for the Division Series and $80 for the LCS. So, maybe they'd be about $200-$300 a pop, with all the other junk they were adding on. I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago reminding me to "Save The Date" of January 29th, which was when they were making All Star tickets available for 15-game plan holders. A few days later, my Account Representative called me to make sure I'd received that message. I told him I had, and I asked him what the pricing structure would be. To my dismay, he confirmed my fears by telling me that the strips "start at around $500."
I told him I'd try to make it work. I suppose that didn't make much difference to him; he's not on commission or anything, and what's besides the point, I was full of crap. There was no real way I was going to make that work. Even if I tried selling off the Sunday and Monday tickets, I'm not really in any kind of position to plonk down approximately $300 more than I paid for my 15 games to go to the All Star Game. So, I knew this morning, when I got an e-mail from the Mets with my "Special one-time only Password" to purchase "Your All Star Ticket Strips," I knew I was simply receiving the privilege of logging onto the Mets website to see just how badly I wasn't able to afford tickets.
I have, in the now 5 seasons I've been buying my ticket plan at Citi Field, sitting in what's generally been known as the "Promenade Infield," generally in sections 518, or, in 2011, 517 (and a move to 512 in 2013). A ticket strip in one of these sections for the All Star game will set you back $703, or, approximately $20 more than I spent on the two seats in my 15-game plan for the entire 2013 season. Now, my 15 games are one of the few luxuries in life I afford myself, because dammit, I love the Mets that much. Tickets to the All Star Game, at least for me, would have been a nice little bonus had the price been relatively reasonable. $703 was redonkulous. Even choosing a lesser seat was out of the question; strips in the Promenade Reserved were absurd at $553. The Promenade Outfield was merely a pittance at $453 per strip. At least I could have gotten two strips for more than my ticket plan instead of just one in that section.
So, at the risk of getting too "99%," I'll stop here. Those of you who feel you can afford to fork over this kind of money for an All Star Ticket Strip, I tip my cap. But unless I can find my way into a deal on Stubhub or some such outlet, it's doubtful I'll be at the game. The Fanfest, however, is another story...
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