The hub of stubs.

The next time you read one of those newspaper stories about people making a small fortune selling their event tickets on StubHub or some other Internet agency, take it with an appropriate grain of salt.

Since my seat-mate was committed to going to a Gov't Mule concert last night, we had decided to put our World Series game 3 tickets on the StubHub and make some money off the deal. The idea was to make enough for me to pay off a small debt and to have enough to pay for next year's 17-game plan. Nice idea, eh? Not so fast, Kimosabe.

With a face value of $150 each, the initial listing went up last week for the Princely sum of $2,500 for the pair. Quickly, I realized that the price was a tad bit high, since there were other seats in our section for around $2,000. But I let them sit a few days, figuring that the others would sell and ours would move to the top of the list. Plus, there were greedy New Yorkers involved, and that's always good for business.

Long story short (I know, too late) I had to reduce the price about 5 more times until, with less than 4 hours to game time the price was at $500 each - which was still higher than some other seats in our section (yes, there were still seats left) but would at least give us enough to pay for next year's tickets after subtracting out StubHub's hefty 15% brokerage fee.

Looking around the site I saw that there were still 85 listings and tickets available in every section of the ballpark. Ours were in 206 near the right field fair pole, so they were good but not great seats. Once I saw that there were better seats for about the same price I realized that they weren't going to sell.

The not-so-happy ending of the story is that I was able to find someone to go to the game with and the good thing was that we were in one of the few areas of the ballpark that was under cover, which was good since the game was rain-delayed an hour twenty and the rain continued for most of the night. I couldn't help but wonder about all of those people who paid big bucks for better seats and sat there getting soaked while we were in the relative comfort of the overhang. Schmucks.

I suppose there are some people who made a few bucks selling their playoff tickets, but the lesson I took out of it is that the seats have to be very good to fetch the big bucks. I probably could have sold them for slightly more than face value, but that wouldn't have been as good as going to the game which, even though the Phils lost, was a nice event to attend. And I wondered about all those seats that were still on the site at 5:00pm. Between the horrible weather and the short notice, I guess they went unused.

Unless you absolutely cannot go to an event or have great seats, you might be disappointed at the results of selling your seats on the Internet.