Move over, Donald Trump. John Oliver has set his sights on another divisive symbol of American power.
The HBO comic ripped the Yankees as pompous and out-of-touch in a four-minute segment on “Last Week Tonight,” a night before the Bombers were supposed to play host to the Astros on Opening Day (postponed till Tuesday).
The basis for Oliver’s frustration is the Yankees’ ongoing feud with StubHub. The team changed its policy in February to no longer honor print-at-home tickets — a feature used by many fans and specifically StubHub users. The move allows the Yankees to dominate the secondary market through an in-house TicketMaster affiliate.
“The New York Yankees will continue finding ways to look like the biggest elitist a–holes in all of sports,” Oliver said near the start of his rant.
Yankees COO Lonn Trost has become the face of the issue because of the eyebrow-raising comments he made after the policy change.
“The problem below market at a certain point is that if you buy a ticket in a very premium location and pay a substantial amount of money,” Trost said back in February. “It’s not that we don’t want that fan to sell it, but that fan is sitting there having paid a substantial amount of money for a ticket and [another] fan picks it up for a buck-and-a-half and sits there, and it’s frustrating to the purchaser of the full amount . . . And quite frankly, the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.”
Oliver’s plan to combat the issue was to buy a pair of Legends tickets behind home plate for each of the three games of the Yankees’ season-opening series against the Astros — and re-sell them to fans for 25 cents. Not exactly a long-term solution, but still hilarious. The way to win the tickets was to tweet at the show with the hashtag #IHaveNeverSatInAPremiumLocation and the trashy outfit you and your guest would wear to the game.
The Yankees would respond later in the day.
“Everyone is welcome at Yankee Stadium. And I thank John Oliver for buying Yankees tickets,” Yankees president Randy Levine said in a statement.
And here are some of the responses Oliver and his staff had to choose from:
https://twitter.com/tommy_bayy/status/716981590929358848/photo/1
https://twitter.com/MikeMihno/status/716976429058105345/photo/1
https://twitter.com/jhd243/status/716980732724424704/photo/1
https://twitter.com/magno_salsa/status/716971655130693633/photo/1
https://twitter.com/johnnylupiani/status/716940673178550272/photo/1