Star treatment for Yankees and Dodgers fans with deep pockets at World Series

Hours before the Yankees opened their World Series homestand against the Los Angeles Dodgers Monday, tickets ranged from $724 to $16,185 on resale giant StubHub.

Those were asking prices, not necessarily sales, and ticket prices appeared to have fallen with the Yankees fortunes after they lost the first two games of the series. But to get into a packed stadium for the first Yankees home World Series game since 2009, most fans had to pay dearly.

The low end rose to $992 with fees and didn’t actually buy a seat; rather, it bought a Pinstripe Pass, which granted access to "non-designated standing room only locations through the Stadium" or at a number of "social gathering locations," according to the Major League Baseball website. The website noted, sternly, that Pinstripe Pass holders "may not occupy ticketed seats," cafe seats or portable folding chairs.

The high end, which came to $21,854 with fees, bought a place in sports paradise: Row 2, Section 18 of the Legends Suite, "curated for those who demand the best in baseball."

Plush, but pricey

For the price of a decent used car, or roughly three years of instate tuition at a SUNY college, fans in a Legends Suite got an actual seat near the Yankees dugout — nicely cushioned — with perks including use of a private stadium entrance and all-inclusive food and nonalcoholic beverages. It was possible for a Legends suite guest to get a hot dog, but it was probably not easy, judging by the photo gallery on the MLB website: all the free cupcakes, steak, sushi and stone crab claws would get in the way.

Ticket marketplace Vivid Seats put the average sold ticket price for the game at $1,682, the highest of the series so far. At game time, another marketplace said in a press release Monday afternoon, the Yankees’ 0-2 series start meant that ticket prices at the stadium were "crashing," with lowest-cost prices down from $1,745 last Wednesday to $854 Monday and top-priced tickets down from more than $27,000 last week to $16,167.

In the Bronx Monday evening, there were a few fans like Elbi Cho, 49, a Mets-loving used car salesman from Queens, waiting for the game to start and for resale market prices to drop. He refused to pay more than a few hundred dollars. "This is not my team," he said outside Yankee Stadium as the game time approached.

Most people cheerfully said they’d spent thousands.

"I paid $6,000 a ticket and bought five," said New Jersey resident Mark Lauber, who’d come with his sons and their girlfriends. "I’ve been to three World Series when the Yankees won and you can’t put a price on it. It’s so exhilarating. It’s something I’ll never forget — I was at the '77 World Series when Reggie Jackson hit three home runs. ... You can’t put a price on it."

Once in a lifetime

Jose and Alma Hernandez, Dodgers fans from Orange County, California, paid $2,200 each for seats near the press box behind home plate.

"We’ve decided along the way — we’ve been married 24 years — that we’re going to give each other experiences," said Jose Hernandez, 50, a lawyer. He and Alma Hernandez, 51, a judge, start watching baseball in spring training and sometimes buy season tickets, he said. A series like this might, like Halley’s comet, come around once a lifetime.

"We’re not going to see another series like this," he said. But, "there is always a limit. I don’t know what it is right now, but there is always a limit."

Joanne Carducci, the social media personality JoJoFromJerz, said she paid $3,200 for tickets for herself and her 15-year-old son, Leo.

"I’ve been bringing my kids to Yankees games since 2019, since I first got separated from their dad and I couldn’t afford any tickets at all," she said. "I had to sit on the 400s in the clouds and it was so high that I was scared. I made a promise to myself that within a very short time I would be sitting low, and I worked and worked, and five years later, I’m at the World Series with my son."

Said Leo: "We came all this way, and it’s awesome."

In the Ford Field MVP seats, not far from the field but above the Legends area, Elliott Kreppel, 56, a tax firm owner from Monroe Township, New Jersey, said he didn’t know how much his tickets had cost, and that it didn’t really matter. He’d come with his son, Jake, 25.

"Money comes and goes, but memories are forever." Also: he sits in Legends during regular season, and the free food "after a while, it’s too much ... the lobster, it’s just too much."