Red Sox opt out of StubHub-MLB AM agreement

The Red Sox have opted out of an agreement struck last year in which Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which controls online ticket sales for all 30 MLB teams, agreed to have StubHub become the official ticket reseller for Major League Baseball. StubHub says it has already signed up the Yankees, the Mets, and the Cubs, and it expects most of the teams to participate.

I learned about the Sox' decision as I was reporting a story for this week's Phoenix, about the growing difficulty of landing face value tickets for Fenway Park. When many Sox fans got meager returns, if anything, during the team's January 26 online ticket sale, StubHub became a focal point of criticism in a thread on Sons of Sam Horn.

Sox spokeswoman Susan Goodenow would only say this in explaining the team's decision to me, via e-mail, last Saturday:

“We are exploring all options with the secondary-ticket market with an eye toward taking a walk-before-we-run approach. We expect to reach clarity on the issue within the next week or so.”

Asked whether the Sox are considering using Patriots-style tactics with fans who resell tickets on StubHub, Goodenow would only repeat that the team is "exploring all options."

It's entirely possible, as I write in my story, that concerns about frustrated fans may have influenced the Red Sox' decision.

As it stands, thousands of Sox tickets for the 2008 season can still be found on various Web sites, including StubHub, whose top-selling category is baseball tickets, and where the hyper-popular Sox are listed first among the MLB offerings.

We’re not likely to hear the Red Sox state it so plainly, but the organization’s decision to opt out of the MLB-StubHub relationship reflects a delicate calculus, a consequence of the team’s success under the ownership that bought the franchise in 2002.

Because the Henry-Werner-Lucchino troika has emphatically staked its claim as the guardians of Fenway Park — the heart of Red Sox Nation — it faces the challenge of maximizing the team’s profits while preserving the sense that Average Joes can still get into the place.

As Glenn Stout, the author of more than 50 baseball books, including co-author of Red Sox Century (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), notes, the question of whether StubHub is good for Sox supporters is kind of beside the point. The precious nature of Sox tickets, he says, “is a product of how a lot of things have changed down at Fenway Park, in Major League Baseball,” and in professional sports.

The Red Sox will keep drawing as long as the team is winning. But if the fan base feels it is being excluded and taken for granted, there could be fallout.

Stout notes that fans’ connection with the Sox “is an emotional one that often flies in the face of logic.” If these diehards step back and start thinking about the amount of time and money they’re devoting to the team, “That’s not a good thing for the Red Sox as an entity, and it’s not a good thing for the Red Sox as a business.”