Yankees COO Lonn Trost gives a snobby and elitist explanation for new ticket policies

Yesterday we talked about the Yankees’ new ticket policy which is aimed at knocking out Stubhub and keeping the secondary ticket market for the team. Today Yankees’ Chief Operating Officer Lonn Trost was asked about that policy and said something pretty eyebrow-raising.

After first giving the largely silly explanation that the ticket plan was to combat fraud, as well as to offer some counterfactual argument about how Stubhub could, if it wanted to, offer mobile tickets which adhere to the policy (they can’t because the Yankees won’t let them) he talked about the . . . difficulties that can be encountered when one buys below-face-value tickets from Stubhub:

“The problem below market at a certain point is that if you buy a ticket in a very premium location and pay a substantial amount of money. It’s not that we don’t want that fan to sell it, but that fan is sitting there having paid a substantial amount of money for a ticket and [another] fan picks it up for a buck-and-a-half and sits there, and it’s frustrating to the purchaser of the full amount . . . And quite frankly, the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.”

Oh really? Question, Mr. Trost: how often do you know how much the person next to you paid for their seat? And, more significantly, what about a person who doesn’t sit in premium locations might “frustrate” your rich season ticket holders who do?

I have a few ideas of what he is implying. None of them are anything but ugly.

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