Here's How Baseball's All-Star Game Seats Rank Among Sports tickets

Major League Baseball's All-Star Game isn't the Super Bowl, but it outprices almost every other all-star event and fetches higher prices than some World Series games.
By Jason Notte ,

Baseball's All-Star Game, which happened last night, isn't the big draw it once was. But it's still a big deal.

Within the last half-century, the audience for the All-Star Game peaked at 36.3 million when ABC aired it back in 1976. The Cincinnati Reds' "Big Red Machine" had five players named to the starting roster and seven in the game overall as the National League pummeled the American League 7-1. Just last year, however, that All-Star audience dropped to 10.9 million on Fox, tying an all-time low.

That said, it's still a bigger crowd than the 8 million the National Football League drew for its Pro Bowl on ESPN earlier this year. It's also better than the 7.6 million viewers the NBA managed for its All-Star game on TNT in February. At this point, it goes without saying that any of those three All-Star games blew out the 1.6 million audience for the National Hockey League All-Star game, which was also played in February.

It's why, despite World Series viewership numbers that have drifted below 15 million per game -- or less than the average for the NBA Finals -- fans and networks keep shelling out for Major League Baseball games. In 2012, ESPN agreed to pay the MLB $700 million a year for eight years for both broadcast and digital rights to game broadcasts and for the right to broadcast one wild card game each year. That same year, Turner agreed to pay $300 million each season through 2012 in exchange for better playoff access. Fox, however, entered an eight-year deal that pays Major League Baseball $500 million per year for rights to regular season games, playoff games, the World Series and, perhaps most importantly, the All-Star Game.

According to Kantar Media, the $625,000 average price that Fox can charge All-Star Game advertisers for 30-seconds of time is more than it fetches for that same time during the World Series ($500,000) or what ABC can charge for the NBA Finals ($563,000).

So what does it cost to get in? Well, as of Friday, the folks at StubHub placed the median price of an All-Star ticket for yesterday's event in San Diego at $499. That's still considerably more than the $293 median that ticket sellers received for the NHL All-Star Game in Nashville and well more than the $115 that NFL fans could muster for the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. Only the NBA All-Star Game in Toronto did better, pulling in a median $766 per ticket. However, the lowest-priced seat for baseball's All-Star Game on StubHub was $150, which was far more than the $95 floor for NBA Finals tickets. Meanwhile, the $12,000 ceiling for MLB All-Star premium seats not only nearly doubles the $6,500 price of the NBA All-Star Game's swankiest seats, but was worth nearly ten times the cost of the most expensive Pro Bowl and NHL All-Star Game tickets.

Meanwhile, that $499 median seat is also higher than the median $330 price of an NHL Finals ticket in Pittsburgh or the $394 median for Game 1 of last year's World Series in Kansas City. That $150 low price also outpaced the $99 cost of seeing Game 1 of the NBA Finals in Oakland this year.

But even those median ticket prices are just for the MLB All-Star Game itself. Chris Leyden, spokesman for online ticket aggregation and resale company Seat Geek, notes that his site's average price for the All-Star Game going into the weekend was $691. If you wanted to watch the celebrity softball game and futures game on Sunday, that cost an extra $46. Wanted to catch workouts or the Home Run Derby on Monday? That was another $337.

As Leyden notes, this year's resale price makes this All-Star the most expensive on record, topping the $643 price of the 2013 All-Star Game at Citi Field in New York. Though this year's average price will keep dropping closer to game time, it falls short of only the $967 price of the NBA finals and exceeds SeatGeek's averages for the NHL's all-star event ($370) and the Pro Bowl ($125).

To provide you some example of how impressive that is, this year's MLB All-Star tickets were more expensive than 35% of the Stanley Cup games SeatGeek has sold tickets to(including the $287 Game 1 of this year's series), 40% of all World Series Games and a whopping 46% of NBA Finals games.

And it's only getting more expensive. Ticket aggregation and retail site notes that since prices bottomed out at an average of $351 apiece for the 2011 game in Phoenix, the resale price for seeing baseball's All-Stars soared to $857 last year. Though they have a long way to go before reaching the Super Bowl's average resale prices in the mid-four figures, baseball's All-Star tickets remain a tough get.

Sure, there's the lure of watching a one-off event in a sport that's known for long series. Sure, there's the fact that the All-Star game determines which league will have home-field advantage in the World Series (and has since 2003, after fans had to endure a 7-7 tie in a meaningless game a year earlier). But the guarantee that the baseball game you're watching is actually going to mean something has given All-Star Game tickets increasing value at a time when baseball is doing everything it can just to hang on to an audience.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author held no positions in the stocks mentioned.

Loading ...