by James Grogg

Created on: March 11, 2010

More often than not you will hear complaints about how expensive it is to go to a Major League Baseball game.  Yeah the price of the beer is way out of the stratosphere and yes that hot dog shouldn't cost 10 dollars.  But then again the only places where a hot dog costs 10 dollars are places on the East Coast.  That's right.  It's not just the outrageous prices of those Yankee Stadium tickets that have gone up.  Fenway, Shea Stadium and even Nationals Park are all inflated.

For the "quality" of play that the Nationals put on the field they do suffer in amount of ticket sales, sure.  But they still put their prices in the same range as better teams that play out of the Midwest.  The math is astronomically wrong in that calculation.  I don't mean to just pick on the Nationals though.  There are several other teams such as the Pirates, Royals and Reds who have had similar situations where they are not putting the product on the field to justify charging so much.  But these are just the complaints with these high prices.

On the other side of the coin are the teams that can justify it.  As much as i hate to say it the Yankees can justify charging a high dollar amount at their stadium.  They pay players higher salaries than most teams do and the results are there with more World Series wins than any other team in baseball.  Are the players justified in demanding so much money from certain teams?  Yes and no.  Most people will look at a players salary and say that he's just greedy.  With some of them it's true and those are the exceptions to the rule.  If you were to look at a good number of the players making the upper dollar amounts they donate, not only time, but a lot of money to charity.  For the ones who don't do that, well, I'd like to see an average Joe crank a 95 MPH fastball or a hard breaking curve ball better than 300 feet into the bleachers like most of the Pros can.

Before people complain about ticket prices they should look at one thing though.  Would they rather pay out their hard earned money to see a good team win or pay out that same amount of money to see a bad team loose?  I think the answer to that is pretty clear.  So before you go stampeding against every team in the majors for charging 40 dollars for whats still a really good seat, go ask the bad teams why they are charging the same amount and NOT putting that money back into the product that they put on the field.  Just because they all have more money than you or me doesn't mean that they're all bad guys.

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