New approach to tickets:
Ticket plan built on membership piques interest of fans, league
Plan built on membership sparks interest from fans, league.
“There is a buzz . ... People are talking about the plan. In the past, I never heard anyone talk about buying tickets.” Connie Wharton, A’s season-ticket holder who would love to see a full Coliseum for every game
As a sign-language interpreter and teacher with three children, Roberto Santiago figured season tickets for a sports team would be out of his reach.
Then earlier this month, while the Oakland A’s were on a burst that put them into a playoff position, the team announced it was doing away with traditional seasonticket plans for next year in favor of a membership program, A’s Access. Anyone who purchases a membership will be able to attend all games at the often sparsely filled Coliseum next season, because buying reserved seats for as few as 10 games means access to several standingroom only areas, as well as the popular Treehouse bar area in left field, for all other games.
Santiago bought five $240 passes at the 24-game level the morning the program went on sale.
“It’s kind of a dream come true,” said Santiago, 41, a lifelong A’s fan who lives in Berkeley. “We’re very moderately middle class, so something as luxurious as season tickets wasn’t going to be in the cards for us without something like this.”
For a team such as Oakland,
which has struggled to draw fans after three last-place finishes in a row, the timing is right, too: The A’s return home Monday to open a ninegame homestand as one of the hottest teams in baseball, having gone 36-12 since June 16 following Sunday’s 8-7 win over the Angels.
Applying a successful sales and revenue model from other industries is well worth a shot to boost attendance. Gyms and country clubs have long offered monthly and annual memberships based on the premise of paying up front for access anytime, and the entertainment world has followed suit, from network streaming services to monthly or year-long passes to movie theaters.
“Obviously, this is a trend in ticketing, even outside of sports,” said Daniel Rascher, director of the sports management program at the University of San Francisco. “Customers and fans want flexibility, and if the teams can absorb the fluctuations in demand, they can take on that risk and offer that to fans . ... Since it’s hard to sell out in baseball, at least for the A’s with a big stadium, there is less worry about being able to seat a huge bulge of fans showing up at a specific game.”
The A’s began experimenting with new ticketing programs last year with their ballpark pass, which was $19.99 a month from June on for unlimited access to the upper level, with seat upgrades available. This year’s Treehouse pass, $149 for the season, was another exploratory effort, and will remain available for 2019.
The A’s currently hold the second wild-card spot in the American League, and Access members would have first access to postseason tickets. The A’s will also allow members to purchase playoff tickets round-by-round rather than require the purchase of an entire postseason package up front — as is standard around the league — with unused balances applied to the following year’s ticket plan.
After the first week of sales of the Access pass, the A’s have added 13 times more new accounts than they did in the same time frame last year, and they’ve renewed existing accounts at three times the rate. With crowds lagging across Major League Baseball — attendance was down 6.6 percent through midJune compared to last year — league officials and other clubs are watching the A’s with interest.
“We’re excited,” said Chris Park, MLB’s executive vice president of global marketing and partnerships. “The more meaningful options we can provide for fans, the better positioned we are, not just with the dyed-inthe-wool fans who have their established routines but people who are new to the game or people who are looking to level up their allegiance to or involvement with clubs. There is a lot of potential there.
“We’re really excited to see the A’s do this and learn side-by-side with them as they go through it.”
For the A’s, the knowledge gained from their ticket sales will be especially valuable as they try to position themselves for a new stadium at Howard Terminal or the Coliseum by their goal of 2023. A’s chief operating officer Chris Giles calls the A’s Access pass “the alpha program” and says that “there are a lot more aspects of the program that, inside a building developed with this in mind, can open up even more facets.”
With their recent success, the A’s are seeing an uptick in attendance. Much of that can be attributed to a sold-out, three-game series against the Giants in July, when the A’s also opened up the seats atop Mount Davis for one day at $10 a seat and drew 56,310 — a record for baseball at the Coliseum. There was also a Saturday night fireworks game against the Tigers and a series against the Dodgers that drew nearly as many Dodgers fans as A’s fans.
“The amount of energy and the positivity with the fan outreach is terrific — some of the negativity of the recent past has sort of gone away, and it helps to have baseball’s most exciting young team,” said Bay Area sports consultant Andy Dolich, who was an A’s executive from 1980-1995. “The question is: At this point, why hasn’t that made a bigger difference in attendance this year? Usually what fans care about the most is the product on the field.”
The A’s are averaging 18,052 fans at the Coliseum this season, thirdworst in baseball behind Tampa Bay (14,683) and Miami (9,676). It’s an interesting contrast to their crowds on the road, where Oakland was drawing an average of 30,391 fans, sixth-best in the league entering Sunday.
Still, there are encouraging signs at home: A Wednesday night game against a poor Blue Jays team attracted 17,058 earlier this month; in May, a Wednesday night game against the Mariners had drawn just 6,991. The A’s TV ratings are up 94 percent from last year, from 0.68 to 1.32 per household, and the team’s game against the Dodgers on Wednesday, with Clayton Kershaw opposing new Oakland starter Mike Fiers, drew the A’s highest rating since 2014, at 2.2.
Meanwhile, the A’s are adding perks left and right to the Access program, which already comes with 50 percent off concessions and 25 percent off merchandise. For the upper tiers of the program (a full- or halfseason of reserved seats), parking is free; for the lower levels, parking — normally $30 — will be $10 per game.
Santiago was delighted to learn he’ll also get the MLB At-Bat subscription for streaming games free, along with a Kids’ Club membership.
“My kids save their allowance to get malt cups, and now they know malt cups will be $2.50 instead of $5. Stuff like that, when you talk about entertainment value for a family, that’s incredible,” he said. “Now for the first time, driving will make sense because parking will cost less than BART and for a family with little kids at night, BART can be a little tough.
“Maybe the traditional season-ticket holders will grumble the rest of us are getting too much right now, but the A’s are making us feel like how you’d think a season-ticket holder would feel.”
Connie Whorton, 67, of San Francisco has been a 24-game plan seasonticket holder for 18 years with her friend Maryann Waterman, and she said she was initially concerned that her long-held privileges would be eroded with the program.
“To be honest, I thought, ‘Are all these new people going to get a better deal than me?’ I was a little apprehensive,” she said. “We had them explain it to us, and what I realized is that, for someone like me, it isn’t really anything new. It’s just been enhanced. Now I can go to any game I want. I can think, ‘I don’t want to watch the game at home tonight, I want to head out there’ and I’m able to do that.”
Giles said the team heard from many fans convinced there must be a catch, but the A’s kept seat prices the same for 2019. That was enough to convince Kevin McCarthy, 65, of Richmond, who had season tickets 12 years ago and was lured back by the full access concept and the reasonable cost. “That’s a real key,” said McCarthy, who is a retired musician. “It’s definitely worth trying for a year.”
With the team playing so well, the interest in the new ticket program and the potential for a ballpark announcement later this year, the A’s might wind up with what every team wants: the perfect storm of positive news right as fans are thinking about renewing tickets or purchasing new plans.
The A’s Access program is doing its part, according to Whorton.
“There is a buzz. It is attracting a lot of people,” she said. “You can hear people as you’re walking around or in your seat; people are talking about the plan. In the past, I never heard anyone talk about buying tickets.
“I would love to have a full Coliseum every year. Wouldn’t that be great? Even half full.”