Whose Tickets Are They, Anyway?

A scalper holds up Red Sox tickets outside Fenway Park in Boston. Photograph by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe

Is scalping baseball tickets wrong?

For Major League Baseball, that depends. How much is it worth?

After years of frowning on ticket re-sale practices, the M.L.B. just struck a deal with StubHub, an online exchange used by fans to unload unwanted game tickets.

This is a major one-eighty for the nation's pastime. Just last season, the Yankees went so far as to revoke season tickets of fans who used the eBay-owned ticket exchange, saying it violated a contract that the ticket holders had with the team.

Since ticket reselling is legal in 38 states, including New York, claiming contractual obligations is the only recourse that teams have in pooh-poohing the growing secondary ticket market.

But all that negativity, M.L.B. reps say, was before the league realized how lucrative it could be! All of a sudden scalping has the organization's stamp of approval, as long as the M.L.B. gets a cut.

In addition to "double dipping" from both the sale and any resale of game tickets, the M.L.B.'s new deal might strike fans as obnoxious for another reason.

It's a smack-down for the individual clubs. Most of the teams already generate revenue through their own separate contracts with other online resale sites like RazorGator, TicketsNow, and even TicketMaster.

Now, the web sites of all 30 teams will direct fans to StubHub to buy and sell their tickets -- which means the league's blanket deal is likely to pick the pockets of some of the teams themselves.

Under the new deal, the league will get a portion of StubHub's revenue, plus a fee (StubHub currently charges a 25 percent levy on transactions).

What StubHub gets in return, in addition to a pipeline full of new business, is help in building its legitimacy as a safe and above-board place to buy and sell tickets.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. After all, the only thing more American than baseball? Capitalism.

by Liz Gunnison