Deciphering the relocation guide - what it means for former "B" plan (half season) licensees

I just finished my first pass through the relocation guide for season ticket holders, and here are some quick highlights (and lowlights) for fellow former "B" plan holders:

- The "B" plan will no longer be named the "B" plan. It is the 41 game plan. Those 41 games are 5 fewer games than this year's 46 game weekday "B" plan.

- The former B planners will be second fiddle in the highly complicated pool process for determining new seat locations. Full season and "A" plan holders will get first priority.

- The Yankees essentially guarantee that former B planners will NOT have reasonable comparable tickets in the new Stadium. Basically, they will sit us wherever they can after considering the questionnaire that must be filled out by September 10.

- Once you fill out the questionnaire, your invoice will be generated based on your responses. The seat location on your first invoice will likely be the best seats you will get.

- From what I can gather from the materials, it seems that the invoice will be paid in installments, instead of all up front. This is likely due to invoices being sent out way earlier than the usual December time frame.

- The 41 game will be VERY different from the former B plan. This plan will now include opening day (FANTASTIC NEWS) and will alternate every other game from then on. So, you will have game 1, game 3, game 5, game 7, game 9, etc. etc. This is actually an improvement since it includes weekends as well. So, what we will almost definitely lose in seat location (I am currently RIGHT behind home plate in section 1) we will gain in better games.

- Prices are the same this year, meaning that what was Tier Reserved MVP tickets will be a season ticket holder price of $25 per ticket. The former Tier Reserve seats (upper deck in the outfield) remain at $20. The good news is, if you get bumped all the way into the outfield, at least you will be paying less.

All of the above information is my interpretation of the very detailed and confusing relocation guide (also sent to season ticket holders by mail). If it seems like something I wrote above doesn't make sense, that is very much a possibility. Feel free to leave a comment on this post letting me know how much this blog sucks or how much I suck. I love to see the friendly remarks.


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Yankee Relocation guide close to going live on Yankees.com

Update (8/29) As seen in the comments below by a not so friendly tipster, a couple of the below-mentioned links are actually live. Peep the comments and thanks for the kind words about the site.

New seating chart with prices

3-D Stadium Tour / Seating Chart

A tipster over at the NYYSI forums has alerted me to this page that he found in Google cache. The page, which is set to go live here at an unspecified date offers a bit more insight into the relocation process, but not much.

At the top of the page, we can see that it says:

Click Here to fill out the relocation questionnaire
Questionnaire must be submitted by September 10,2008

To give fans any reasonable amount of time, they are going to need to go live on this site VERY soon.

Finally, there is this small print:

Opting Out of the Relocation Program
You are not required to participate in the Relocation Program. Licensees may seek to license Plans, subject to availability, as well as tickets to individual Games, outside of the Relocation Program. However, due to the limited inventory of tickets and anticipated demand for tickets under the Relocation Program, you are strongly encouraged to participate in the Relocation Program. Any tickets licensed outside of the Relocation Program will likely result in your receiving a less desirable seating location than had you participated in the Relocation Program.

Failure to Respond by the Invoice Date
If you fail to accept or decline your assignment in the manner described in this Guide by the due date reflected on the invoice accompanying your assignment, you will have no right to license a Plan through the Relocation Program.

Unfortunately, the invoice date is not available anywhere on that cached page.

It looks like there will be a "3-D seat selector" featured on that page as well, so you should be able to check out the view from your likely worse seats before taking the plunge.

Good luck everyone, the day of reckoning is nearly upon us.

Once again, thanks to "peterb" (not to be confused with petera) on the forums for this tip

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The dream still lives - for reasonably priced Yankee tickets in '09

Not so buried in the bevy of articles regarding the Mets top tier ticket price announcement were some more promising quotes from Lonn Trost (Yankees COO). Here is the juicy quote:

"Whatever works for them, I'm happy for them," Yankees chief operating officer Lonn Trost said. "We do what we think is appropriate. In order to have 47,000 affordable seats, we had to have 4,500 expensive seats."

C'mon Lonn - don't take the high road. You should pull a Hank quote about those fans paying less because they are paying for an inferior product! Anyway, the more quotes I read from Lonn saying this very thing, the more I realize that it will be very hard to back-track on their repeated promises to not raise ticket prices for the "cheap seats".

Here is some more info from that article, but this is probably old information and not based on anything Lonn said yesterday:

The Yankees have not announced prices for the seats near the outfield but say they will keep the lowest-priced reserved seats in the top deck at $20 and $25 and bleachers at $12. Trost said 25,000 seats will not have an increase and that a complete price list will be released this month.

Very reasonable.

Finally, here is some interesting info about the Mets "Upper Deck" ticket pricing for next year, and also about how they are handling season ticket sales:

Reserved seats in the upper deck at Citi Field, called the Promenade, will average $19.

Howard said the Mets have talked to about 3,000 season ticket holders about relocation and hope to speak with about 3,000 more by the end of next month. The Mets are requiring 10 percent deposits for next year.

10% seems fair. The Yankees will probably ask for it all. That would fall in line with their annual invoice that arrives two weeks before it is due. The idea is to give the people with seniority as little time as possible in order to push them out and not have to deal with their seating priorities.

So, Yankee ticket prices are due "this month". We'll see about that - they've been saying the same thing since the winter.

Go check out the AP article, it has some more interesting info about the Mets tiered ticket prices vs. The Yankees uniform pricing for weekday, weekend, premium, and other variations.


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Finally some concrete information on new Yankee Stadium 2009 Pricing in the "cheap" seats

The AP is reporting on the new Yankee Stadium 2009 pricing with splashy headlines about how much more expensive things are going to be.

However, buried at the end of the article is this juicy bit of information that has me pretty excited as a season ticket holder in the Tier Reserved MVP section:

As for the regular seats, the Yankees hope to send out a relocation plan in April. Through Thursday, the Yankees had sold 39,141 full-season equivalents.

Trost said there will be about 11,000 non-premium seats at field level and 12,000 at the main level. He said 25,000 seats from the final year of the current ballpark won't be increased for 2009.

"Of the non-premium seats, 88 percent will be less than $100," he said. "It's easy to say that that's not cheap, but on the other 55 percent of the ballpark is going to be $45 or less. That's over 24,000 seats. We recognize everybody can't afford the suites. At the same time, we're trying to allow those suite prices to subsidize the other seating in the stadium. Look, the bleachers are $12, will be $12. The grandstand is $20 and $25, will be $20 and $25."

The "he" in the quotes is Lonnie Trost, COO of the Yankees.

This is clearly good news as it looks like next year will NOT see a price increase for the Tier Reserved, MVP seats.

However, I am in section 1 right now (DIRECTLY behind home plate) and have around 4 years of seniority. The HUGE question remains - where will my seats be located in the new stadium?

As soon as I receive that relocation guide in the mail, I will post the exciting information here.

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