The management of the Yankees seems determined to alienate loyal fans by making it very difficult to sell tickets they have purchased but can’t use. Well, I’d like to help the team deliver the ultimate zinger to season ticket-holders.
It’s something that the downtrodden Rutgers University basketball program is already doing: eliminate paper tickets altogether and load the games onto a single plastic card.
I broke the story about the Yankees ticket mess in 2013. The team was irked that ticket-holders — many of them diehard fans with season tickets — were reselling them at prices below the face value.
There was a simple solution to this: Field a competitive team that would prop up prices. Instead, management went after resellers, particularly StubHub, where unwanted tickets could be had for a few bucks.
Aside from losing revenue at their own ticket window, the Yankees seemed insulted that people were getting into the stadium so inexpensively.
So management went to court and made StubHub move its storefront far enough away from the stadium to make ticket pickup inconvenient. The Yankees also set up their own ticket exchange, where resale prices couldn’t fall below face value.
But bargain hunters could still buy tickets through StubHub and others and print them at home. A few weeks ago, the Yanks attacked this system as well, under the pretense that tickets bought through StubHub could be counterfeit.
People who already bought season tickets for 2016 with the hope of seeing some games and selling other tickets are incensed about the switcheroo. For the record, I’ve purchased through StubHub often and never got a fake ticket.
But hey, I’d like to help the Yankees further decimate relations with their fans. That’s why I am proposing the Rutgers solution. The credit card-like season “ticket” makes it nearly impossible to sell a single ticket short of giving the card to someone for the day and hoping they’ll return it.
There is a way to transfer tickets but it has to be done through an exchange system that Rutgers set up. And if you lose the Rutgers card, you’re out of luck.
How successful has this been at the university? Dunno. Several officials connected with Rutgers’ basketball program didn’t bother to return my calls. I guess they are too busy losing games.
I wonder how former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke feels about his role in making Donald Trump president.
Trump, of course, isn’t president yet, but he keeps rolling along.
Back in June, I said I thought Trump would be a formidable candidate even as almost everyone else in politics and the media was laughing at him.
“Now that I have you thinking I’m going to bash Trump like most of the press has been doing since he announced his self-financed candidacy last week, I’m going to surprise you,” I wrote.
“I think Trump — if he can stop himself from saying crazy things about his wealth, immigration and such — will be a very important factor in the 2016 election.”
To be fair, I also said I didn’t think Trump would become president. And he continues to say crazy stuff.
But my point was: If Trump stuck to jobs and finances, he would be formidable. Bernanke’s monetary policies have been instrumental in making the electorate angry.
The economy was (and still is) weaker than Washington wants people to believe. But voters know in their gut what’s really going on — and Trump is the beneficiary.
If Machiavelli were running the Republican Party, this is what he would do: help Trump win the presidential election, then impeach him and remove him from office for some real or imagined crime.
His election seems inevitable, especially if the Democrats pick Hillary Clinton as their candidate.
If the Republicans hate Trump so much, all they have to do is make sure a mainstream party member like Marco Rubio gets the vice president slot. Once Trump is kicked out of office, Rubio becomes president, and House Speaker Paul Ryan is next in line.
Readers: I’m going to let you in on a little inside journalism.
Last Friday, I had an exclusive story about how New York City was telling companies to ask for an extension of their tax filings because the state screwed up the production of some forms and instructions related to rule changes announced more than a year ago.
Every NYC company — not just the 45,000 affected by the changes — was told by Mayor Bill de Blasio ’s officials to ask for a delay, a move that will severely pinch the city’s cash flow. As a courtesy, I asked the city’s Finance Department for a comment and clarification.
But just hours before I was going to break the news, the Tax Department put out a press release about the filing extensions. Naturally, it left out the part about how the city and state had screwed up.
I’ve asked my sources who are familiar with city and state taxes to fill me in whenever there is a screwup. And I want to know whenever the de Blasio administration wastes taxpayer money.
And because of the low standard of professional ethics on the part of the mayor’s people, I will never again call them for comment. They will just have to take their chances that I get it right.
Let the battle begin.