Phillies fans should be cautious about secondary market tickets

Philadelphia’s decision to allow limited fan attendance at sports venues was met with a rush of excitement this week — understandably so, after a grueling year of games with fake crowd noise and feel-good cardboard cutouts instead of fans in the stands.

But as Citizens Bank Park and the Wells Fargo Center begin welcoming spectators back, those eager to see live games need to be careful about buying up tickets being sold on secondary markets. 

Numerous listings selling tickets for Phillies games surfaced this week on StubHub — MLB’s official secondary market partner — despite that the team has not begun to sell tickets yet and hasn’t even released a seating chart for the 8,800 fans who will be permitted at each home game.

More Phillies ticket also have appeared on other secondary ticket-selling sites, like SeatGeek.

The secondary market tickets are for sale for hundreds of dollars. For example, on Friday night two tickets for the Cardinals game at Citizens Bank Park were selling for $369 a piece for seats in the ballpark’s upper deck – Row 16 of Section 428.

That’s an inflated price, limited seating or not. But it raises more questions, like how how are tickets being sold on the secondary market, when the Phillies haven’t started selling tickets themselves yet? The team confirmed to PhillyVoice that mobile tickets with the barcodes, which are scanned at the gates at Citizens Bank Park prior to entry, have not been issued yet, and at this point, it’s not guaranteed that the seating locations described in the StubHub listings will even be included in the Phillies’ socially-distanced pod layout for fans.

“We’re very aware of the secondary market,” John Weber, the Phillies’ senior vice president of ticket operations and projects, said. “People can post whatever … but no tickets have been transferred to StubHub via the barcode.”

Screen Capture/StubHub.com

This screen capture shows Philadelphia Phillies home game ticket for sale on StubHub on March 4, 2021.

It is unknown how many of these listings resulted in sales, if any, but by Friday evening there were no longer tickets being sold for any of the games in the Mets series from April 5-7 pictured above.

The fact that these listings for Phillies games exist at all is — at best — confusing for buyers using secondary markets.

The Phillies began selling season ticket packages in December, when the organization was unsure what fan attendance might look like by the start of the 2021 season due to COVID-19 restrictions. With the team knowing that uncertainty, but still needing to prepare for the coming season, fans who purchased those packages have not yet been issued tickets with seat assignments – and more importantly – the barcodes that validate them.

Beginning next week, the approximately 10,000 Phillies season ticket holders, who have already paid the team, will have the first crack at pre-sale, single-game tickets for the first 19 home games, before the tickets go on sale to the general public on March 12. 

The team is only selling tickets to the first 19 home games, at a limit of 8,800 spectators per game, which is about 20% of the ballpark’s capacity. The Phillies explained they did this due to the fluidity of the situation and that the pandemic could swing occupancy limits in either direction by the time that early stretch is completed.

According to the Phillies, since the seating chart has not been announced, no secondary seller can sell tickets and guarantee the location of those seats.

Weber explained there is noting preventing a season ticket holder from posting tickets on StubHub, or another site, and someone else could buy them.

“But nothing’s transferred. The barcode is not transferred yet,” Weber said. “The money may be transferred, but the barcode is not transferred. So now, it’s just a matter of StubHub going back to those clients and saying these tickets are not valid.”

A spokesperson for StubHub explained that the MLB partnership…