Fans of the Toronto Blue Jays frustrated with ‘insane’ ticket resale system

Want tickets to see the Toronto Blue Jays at the World Series? You can get them, if you’re willing to pay big bucks. CTV’s Colton Wiens has that story.

Baseball fans are struggling to get their hands on tickets to the World Series but say the most frustrating part is the number of tickets being resold for sky-high prices.

“I think, like a lot of fans, like I’m frustrated that resale markets are where you can only get tickets,” said Ronak Patel, a Jays fan from Ayr, Ont.

He logged onto Ticketmaster Tuesday morning, an hour before World Series tickets went on sale. There were thousands of people ahead of him in the virtual queue line and, when he finally got through, the only tickets left were from verified resellers.

“It’s not fair that people are able to just profit off of the fandom that we have for our sports teams and our bands,” Patel said.

Then, on Wednesday, Patel received a text from the Jays Fan Club about the availability of standing room only General Admission tickets. This time, he logged on within 60 seconds of it going live and was 33,000th in line. Patel said the ticket were originally priced at $345 and sold out before he could buy them. Soon after, he saw they were being resold for $1,205.

“I’ve got a renewed sense of frustration again, after trying to get in to grab some tickets,” explained Patel. “If I lose a ticket out to you because you got in line faster than me, great. Enjoy the game. I’m happy to see you there. Go, Jays, go. But I don’t want somebody else to just make money off of it.”

Patel attended Game 6 of the ALCS with his son and had hoped to see the team play again in the World Series.

“[Game 6] was a great experience. And I know the Jays put a great experience together for their fans. But it’s tough when you have to fork out $1,000 just for General Admission because somebody else bought the tickets faster than we could even get access to them,” he said.

Other fans in the Region of Waterloo have also reported similar experiences.

“They’re a little too pricey, unfortunately. And unfortunately, they’re all just like resales now. Everyone’s just trying to make money off of them. They’re not true fans out there,” said Jays fan Brigitte Gagnon. “I was 3,000 [in the queue]. Then I go in there and they’re all resales, and they’re $2,500 from where we were sitting. It was insane.”

Patel wants the government to create laws limiting the price set by ticket resellers.

At Queen’s Park on Wednesday, Premier Doug Ford suggested his government might introduce legislation to rein in ticket resale prices.

“They’re gouging the people,” Ford told reporters. “When you have one player in the market that controls the tickets, that’s not right for the people. So, we’re actually right now considering legislation.”

In 2019, however, the Ford scrapped a law that capped ticket resale prices at 50 per cent above the original face value, calling it “unenforceable.”

The Federal Trade Commission in the United States is currently suing Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, claiming it falsely imposes strict limits on the number of tickets consumers can buy for an event.

Ticketmaster and its parent company did not respond to CTV News’ request for comment by our deadline, but a Live Nation executive wrote an email last week about the lawsuit which stated: “Ticketmaster will now limit everyone and every entity, ticket brokers included, to only one Ticketmaster account.” It also claimed they would be “increasing efforts to prevent the creation of new, unauthorized accounts that may be used to replace cancelled accounts.”

The email also said Ticketmaster “already blocks over 99 per cent of the up to 25 million account signup attempts every day” and “blocks over 200 million bots daily, a five-fold increase from 2019.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, some of the tickets listed for Game 7 of the World Series were going for as much as $16,000 on resale sites.

“MLB owners have caps. They say you can only spend so much before you get hit with the luxury tax,” Patel said. “So why is it that we go and protect the owners of these organizations that say they have to play fairly against each other? But then for the average fan, it’s free for all.”