Rays Announce Spring Training Prices

The Rays’ official site has all the details for the 2010 schedule in Port Charlotte for those that can make the games. I do have a family condo about 10 minutes down the street from the complex but with all of my fantasy baseball commitments in March for Fanball, I don’t know if I can make it. That said, I don’t know how anxious I would be to go given the pricing of the seats. When did Spring Training get so expensive?

If you want a seat with a chairback at a game and want to park on premises, that’s $25 to see a game where half the roster is made up of players that will be in the minor leagues. If I take my family of four to that game, I am paying $70 just to get in the door for the pleasure to sit outside and watch a game in the Florida sunshine. If I just wait out the calendar until April, I can take my family to a game in Tropicana Field and buy four upper deck seats and get free parking; a $36 bill to watch a major league baseball game.

I don’t mean to sound like one of these bitter old farts who long back for the old days when tickets were $1 and you could get a sodi-pop for a nickel, but prices are getting out of control for Spring Training. Before the Rays were around, I would ditch a lot of classes in March at UCF to run down to Kissimmee to catch Astros games for $6 – and that was just 15 years ago. I remember my best friend (the heckler from the earlier article) and I taking our girlfriends to a game in Lakeland where it ended up being 42 degrees and we froze our asses off – but the tickets only cost us $5 apiece.

Spring Training is a great time in both Florida and Arizona but if the organizations do not watch out, they’re going to price out the average fan with this type of pricing escalation.

Tags: pricing, Spring Training