The unsettled economy has had an effect on the Mets’ ticket sales at Citi Field.
By KEN BELSON
With just a month to go before the first regular-season game at Citi Field, the Mets are doing all they can to sign up season-ticket holders, including offering prospective customers tours of the stadium.
Thus far, a healthy number of fans seem willing to visit the unfinished park to look at seats. It is unclear, though, how many of them are committing to ticket plans, particularly in the most expensive sections.
On Wednesday afternoon, tours were running a half-hour late because the team did not have enough hard hats for visitors to wear. About two dozen fans, some wearing team jerseys and hats, were left to mill around a third-floor lobby.
Groups of about six customers were eventually led to the Caesars Club. The room was set up for a presentation to bartenders and food-service workers who were going to see a slide show that included one slide on “the benefits of serving food fast.”
Ticket agents were friendly, but not pushy. They took fans to whatever sections they wanted to see and did not ask for any commitments at the end of the tour. One guide was reluctant to say how much a luxury suite cost on a per-game basis.
A reporter on one tour saw many groups visiting the upper deck, and a few in the middle decks and outfield sections, but none in the more expensive lower bowl. The search for cheaper seats is consistent with the sale of single-game tickets on Mets.com for games in April and May. For games against the Nationals in April, there are plenty of field-level seats for $180 and a sprinkling of upper-deck outfield seats for $15, but fewer in between.
“We’ve been saying that price is certainly an issue, and our customers are shopping price, and that is attributable to the economy,” said Dave Howard, the team’s executive vice president for business operations.
The Mets are not alone in trying to find buyers for their expensive seats. The Yankees hired a division of a Manhattan residential real estate brokerage, Prudential Douglas Elliman, to help sell some of their unsold premium seats and luxury boxes at the new Yankee Stadium. Those seats cost $350 to $2,500 a game.
The Mets sold out their two exhibition games with the Boston Red Sox in less than an hour. Another baseball game between St. John’s and Georgetown, with tickets at $5 each, sold out as quickly.
The Mets have sold the equivalent of nearly 25,000 full season-ticket packages and another 500,000 tickets in partial packages, about 70 percent of available seats. The Saturday and weekday 15-game packages are sold out, and the Sunday packages are nearly gone.
Seats in the Sterling Level and Field Level run as high as $18,325 each for a season ticket. The cheapest season tickets on the field level are $4,080. The Excelsior Level one deck above starts at $3,264 a seat and runs as high as $14,275 a seat.
In the lobby, the former Mets first baseman Ed Kranepool was seen talking with a receptionist. Asked if he expected his number to be retired some day, he said with a chuckle that because it was not retired at Shea Stadium, where he played from 1964 until 1979, there was no reason to expect it would happen in the Mets’ new home.
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