Opinion | My quest to return to a baseball game
Joe Perrino, Sports Editor
On March 5, I read a tweet that stated outdoor stadiums would be opening April 1, just in time for MLB’s Opening Day.
Almost instantly after I saw the news my phone buzzed with a text from my friend Aaron. Like me, he’s from the San Francisco Bay Area and goes to college in Southern California, specifically at Loyola Marymount University.
“Let’s go to Giants Dodgers games (GOAT),” the message read.
Unfortunately, after looking at the schedule of our hometown San Francisco Giants, we realized they wouldn’t be playing our bitter rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, until June.
That, however, didn’t stop us. No, it actually lit a fire within us. We had a mission: Find the best possible way or any possible way to see our favorite team back on the field this spring while being away in Southern California.
After that first text, the next 30 minutes were absolute chaos. We embarked on a whirlwind of researching, coordinating and planning, all with the eventual premise of paying a lot of money to watch some dudes hit a ball.
Our first idea was to look at the San Diego Padres schedule instead, to see if they are playing the Giants at home anytime soon — and they will be from April 5 to 7. We went straight to third-party ticket websites to see if there was anything on the market, but unfortunately, the Padres hadn’t worked out their seating chart yet.
As the impatient person I am, I couldn’t just sit and wait for those tickets to magically appear. So onto the next option.
I saw the Giants were playing the eternally tortured Miami Marlins in mid-April. Out of curiosity, I checked ticket prices.
They were $11.
Unfathomable. The Dodgers are charging $9,000 for bleacher seats, and on the other side of the country, the Marlins are lowering prices with an already restricted capacity. That’s mind-boggling.
So we did the natural thing: look up flights to Miami. To our surprise, Spirit Airlines — the Greyhound bus of the sky — had $61 round-trip tickets. You read that right. In total, we could jet to Miami, watch a baseball game, and come back for $72. Yet if I wanted to just drive to Los Angeles and watch a game, I’d spend about 125 times as much.
This got me worried. But a couple days later I got some partially good news: Padres tickets were available. Season ticket holders already had some seats posted for sale on websites like SeatGeek. Fortunately, none of them were charging obscene amounts of money like the Dodgers, but they were still $150.
At this point, honestly, I’d pay that much, but there were some underlying issues which really grinded my gears.
After clicking on the tickets and seeing the price, there was an additional $53 seller’s fee. Ridiculous. You expect me to pay an additional third of the ticket price?
So whether it’s the Dodgers or third-party ticket vendors, this capitalization on fans’ interest in getting back to games is disappointing. I’m a poor college student. I don’t have the money to pay hundreds of dollars to sit in socially distanced plastic chairs just to watch the game I so dearly love.
But stay tuned; I won’t let these setbacks stop me. I will go to a game no matter who or what tries to tear me down in my tracks. I will fly to Miami. I will drive cross-country. I will stop at nothing in my quest. Just please, MLB teams, lower your ticket prices.