Posted 12:53 PM by Sean
Uh...yeah. Duke and Notre Dame. Well, at least now I can concentrate on baseball.

The average ticket price at Fenway this year will be $42.34. That's per person. That's also almost eighteen bucks higher than the next-highest average ticket price, Yankee Stadium's $24.86.

Part of this is just supply and demand, of course - Fenway only seats 34,000 or so, give or take the 280 they're going to put on top of the Green Monster. But part of it is also that Boston fans are nuts. I caught a weekend series in Fenway a couple of summers ago, and scalped seats were going for $100 per - against the Royals. I'll say two things about Red Sox fans: first, aside from Cardinals fans, they're far and away the most knowledgable about what's going on during a game. You'll hear conversations in Busch and Fenway that would challenge a lot of TV "analysts" (note the judicious use of quotation marks). Second, Fenway has the highest proportion of drunken idiots I've ever seen at a ballpark. No, scratch that - as a sometime drunken idiot myself, I don't mean to badmouth my tribe. Fenway has aggressively idiotic drunks. During the Friday night game I saw, the guy sitting to my left got into a fistfight with the guy sitting two seats to my right because the latter objected to the fact that the former had chosen to walk in front of him to leave the aisle on his way to the concession stand, rather than going the other way. Mind you, I was still sitting between them when the fight broke out, meaning they were throwing punches at each other while standing on opposite sides of me.

That's Fenway: some jackasses, some guys who know Rich Garces' opposing batting average splits by heart, and some who are an intersection of those sets. When that's your fan base, you can pretty much charge whatever you want.

The Angels, by the way, raised their average ticket price to $15.97, which is a 35.5% increase but still below the MLB average of $18.69.