Fans celebrate after the Toronto Blue Jays won the American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners in Toronto on Monday.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
From flying to California and splitting VIP packages, to waiting until first pitch and crowdfunding, Toronto Blue Jays fans are trying unconventional methods to get their hands on World Series tickets as resale prices soar.
Tickets to Game 1 of the championship series with the Los Angeles Dodgers officially went on sale Tuesday morning, with the cheapest seats as of Thursday priced around $1,300 apiece. Premium field-level seats near the dugout go for as much as $10,000.
Kayla Etreni, from Kelowna, B.C., was confident she’d manage to snag Jays tickets for herself and her family back in Ontario, after joining the Ticketmaster waiting room 18 minutes before the sale opened and only seeing 2,000 people ahead of her.
“I was like, okay, there’s like 40,000 tickets. I’m going to get a ticket,” she said. The current capacity for a Jays game at the Rogers Centre is approximately 39,000.
Ms. Etreni managed to get as far as selecting four upper-bowl seats priced at just over $500 each after taxes and fees.
Blue Jays fans, resellers race for World Series tickets
But, she said, after trying to submit her payment, “it said we’ve detected an error – we think you’re a bot, essentially.”
What was meant as a safety measure felt ironic, Ms. Etreni said. Ticketmaster has previously been accused of turning a blind eye to bots harvesting tickets off its website.
In a statement to The Globe and Mail, Ticketmaster said it does not set or control ticket prices, “and especially not the resale prices that are justifiably getting so much attention.” It said those are set by the sellers, many of whom are professional resellers trying to maximize sale prices.
The company also stressed that tickets sold on its site are verified and authenticated, and that it continues to invest in new technology to fight “scalper bots used to cheat fans.”
Like Ms. Etreni, many Jays fans have complained that they were booted out of the Ticketmaster queue and faced limited options beyond paying inflated resale costs: “The majority were like $1,900, $2,300, I would say, for nosebleeds,” she said of prices on StubHub.
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This has prompted some fans to get creative.
Since the Jays clinched their spot in the World Series, flight searches from Toronto to Los Angeles have increased to almost eight times the typical traffic, according to data from Kayak. The travel platform found that airfare from Toronto to LA hovered at $399, and average nightly stays in LA stood at $281 as of Wednesday night.
The cheapest tickets for Games 3, 4 and 5 in the home of the Dodgers were at just over $860 a ticket on StubHub. Altogether, that totals about $1,540 for flights, tickets and accommodation to see the Jays play abroad.
While by no means cheap, that would include a trip to the iconic Dodger Stadium for about $250 more than the going-rate for nosebleed seats at the Jays’ home field.
Other fans have jumped on the option of booking hotel rooms overlooking the interior of the Rogers Centre. Demand for field view rooms at the Toronto Marriott City Centre jumped after the World Series win, with rooms almost immediately selling out for Games 1 and 2, said Ryan Soderberg, the hotel’s general manager.
But rooms have become available on short notice. “This has been the experience of some guests over the past 24 hours, who were able to secure field view rooms for the games this weekend,” Mr. Soderberg said.
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Each field view room currently starts at $3,999 during the World Series and can accommodate five people, so a group of friends who split the costs would pay $799 each, or about $500 less than the cost of resold nosebleeds.
Among the more unconventional methods, a GoFundMe page under the name of Dave Whitty has currently amassed $7,617 in crowdfunding for a ticket to Game 1.
“I don’t need a private jet or front-row seats. I just need 4,000 generous souls with $1 each to help me get in the building to watch the Blue Jays in the World Series,” Mr. Whitty wrote. His campaign has already surpassed his goal by more than $3,000.
More low-key fans have sworn by district drops – a program for ticket drops from the team itself.
“General sale is extremely difficult because you have thousands of people at the same time trying to get tickets,” Jays fan Max Fireman said in an e-mail. “When you have the district drop you have a text message that you enter and it weeds out thousands of people who are busy at work or busy doing something else and not expecting a text.”
Other Jays fans are waiting it out. Kendall Yale previously told The Globe that after failing to snag tickets during the initial release for Game 6, she spent a rainy Sunday evening outside the Rogers Centre refreshing the Ticketmaster app.
Minutes before first pitch, ticket prices dropped as Ticketmaster’s sales deadline approached, landing Ms. Yale 100-level seats for about $250. She plans to try the strategy again this Friday, though she expects to pay much more this time around.
But many, including Ms. Etreni, have abandoned the race for tickets, if simply to avoid putting money in the pockets of resellers. “I’m not going to buy $8,000 worth of tickets,” she said. “It’s not worth it.”
Fans still holding out hope may yet get lucky. Rogers Communications Inc., which owns the Jays, announced Thursday that it’s giving away a total of 500 free tickets to fans every World Series home game.