When we first read this item in the Post yesterday about Mets fans who were “incensed” to find out that their ticket prices were lowered by as little as one percent for 2010, we gave the club the benefit of the doubt. After all, the team promised to cut prices by an average of 10 percent, and they did — some by more than 10 percent, and some by less. But perhaps that’s because we didn’t pay much attention to the most upsetting line in the article. Luckily, Faith and Fear in Flushing did.
Mets spokesman Dave Howard defended the club, explaining that an average meant that some decreases would be more than others, adding that “We haven’t heard any outrage about this.” At which point, Faith and Fear’s Jason Fry opened up his mailbag and dug out this missive from a fan whose tickets in the upper deck were cut by just 3 percent.
We’ll go ahead and file this under “outrage”:
Over the course of the season, that comes out to 75 cents per game! I understand that when they said prices would be lowered by 10% “on average” that it didn’t necessarily mean that every single ticket would go down by exactly 10%. I’m not dumb. But that’s how the Mets are treating me. They tell us that they’re gonna lower tickets by 10% and they lower mine by 3%. I’m sure that they will point to incredibly expensive seats, which they are lowering from something like $500 a ticket to $400 a ticket (so that no normal person can afford them either before or after the price cut, making no difference in the lives of anyone other than corporations) and say that their 20% decrease and my 3% decrease somehow evens out to 10% on average. But trying to convince me with that argument presumes that I’m dumb. And I’m not.
There’s more, but it gets kind of impassioned after that. But that shouldn’t stop you from reading it.