Toronto Blue Jays fans strike out on fair prices during World Series

Vass Bednar, managing director at The Canadian SHIELD Institute for Public Policy, joins BNN Bloomberg to assess Blue Jay's resale ticket prices.

It’s not just supply and demand that is driving up the price of Toronto Blue Jays tickets, it’s the fact that fans are deprived of a fair chance to snag a ticket in the first place, and that’s unfair, says a consumer watchdog.

With the Blue Jays in the World Series for the first time in three decades, tickets to watch the game at home in the Rogers Centre are highly sought after.

But when fans flood the officially licensed and authorized seller, Ticketmaster, to get a ticket, they are allegedly beaten by bots who scoop up the tickets and re-sell them for thousands of dollars.

“The first come first served doesn’t work as well when we’re clicking and refreshing when you’re in that digital queue, and a couple of minutes later, suddenly all the tickets are gone,” Vass Bednar, managing director at the Canadian Shield Institute for Public Policy told BNN Bloomberg.

“It’s really this element of Ticketmaster formalizing the resale market so that they can sell a ticket one or two or three times, and also using their technology and software to proxy that demand.”

With three wins against the Los Angeles Dodgers under their belt, the Blue Jays are one win away from winning the World Series.

On Ticketmaster, verified resale tickets for Game 6 on Friday are selling for around $2,500 for nosebleed seats.

Field level seats range from $4,000 to $11,000. A StubHub ticket behind home plate is $112,953.

• This is how much Toronto Blue Jays World Series Game 6 tickets are selling for

Restricting resales

Bednar supports some jurisdictions’ proposals to restrict the rate of resale, which means verified resales should re-sell the tickets back at face value, or at a set profit.

Last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said his government is looking into legislation to cap ticket resale prices while thousands of Blue Jays fans can’t afford to watch their team play in the Rogers Centre.

A price cap was already in place in 2017 by the previous Ontario Liberal Government. The Ticket Sales Act limited ticket resales to 50 per cent over their original value.

But the Ford Government scrapped that legislation after taking office in 2019 citing difficulty in enforcement.

Earlier this week, the Ontario Liberal Party introduced an amended version of their previous bill, now called, Stop Ripping Off Fans Act, to reinstate the cap of ticket resale to 50 per cent over their original value.

Ticketmaster under investigation

In September, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seven states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster for “tacitly coordinating with brokers and allowing them to harvest millions of dollars worth of tickets in the primary market.”

The FTC says the firms misled both artists and fans through bait-and-switch pricing, advertising lower prices than what consumers ultimately paid, and by falsely claiming to enforce strict ticket limits that brokers routinely exceeded.

Last week, the company announced it is shutting down its Trade Desk platform limiting professional resellers to one account.

“It’s hard to understand, based on my reading of the Internet, what makes people more mad. Is it Ticketmaster writ large, who, by the way, is under another investigation by the FTC? Or is it, you know, the fact that there are potential solutions proposed at its core,” said Bednar.

“We don’t have to take these trends as being inevitable.”