Yankees won’t accept print-at-home tickets at Yankee Stadium for 2016 season
Fans line up to enter before the game between the Yankees and the Toronto Blue Jays on Opening Day on April 6, 2015 at Yankee Stadium. But they will no longer be able to use tickets printed at home. Credit: Getty Images / Elsa
The Yankees announced they no longer will accept print-at-home tickets, which the team says will help guard against fraud and add convenience for fans.
But the move is being widely viewed as an attempt to make it more difficult to use secondary-market sites such as StubHub, which relies heavily on the print-at-home model. (Most MLB teams, including the Mets, have partnerships with StubHub; the Yankees do not.)
The Yankees will accept only two types of tickets: traditional ones that are printed on hard-stock paper, or mobile ones, in which a fan would show his or her smartphone upon entering the stadium, just as like many travelers now do in lieu of a printed boarding pass when getting on an airplane.
Print-at-home tickets have become the norm in the last decade or so. A fan receives an emailed PDF of a ticket, prints it out and presents it at the stadium to be scanned. (The Mets accept all three types of tickets, as do most Major League Baseball teams.)
The Yankees said print-at-home tickets “are being discontinued so as to further combat fraud and counterfeiting of tickets associated with print-at-home paper tickets.”
There is nothing the Yankees legally can do to stop a fan from reselling a hard-copy ticket, but much of StubHub’s business is built on the print-at-home model. That option now is gone, which will complicate fans’ ability to buy resale tickets on short notice outside the team-controlled Yankees Ticket Exchange.
“StubHub believes that the best customer experience is one on a free and open marketplace where fans can buy and sell tickets whenever and wherever they want,” StubHub said in a statement Wednesday.
It is possible that other ticketing services, including StubHub, will find technological paths around the Yankees’ mobile system over time. But the PDF road has been shut down.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
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