A Phillies fan forwarded me an email they received this past Saturday. The subject line said “Get a $20 promo code when you list your MLB tickets,” and the email body looked like this:

At the bottom of the email, which came from “feedback@mail.mlbemail.com,” it says “you received this message as a Phillies Season Ticket Holder.”

For the sake of anonymity we’ll call our fan “Bobby.” Bobby thought it was “blatant hypocrisy” that season ticket holders would be presented with an incentive to sell their postseason tickets, noting that the Phillies have playoff ticket guidelines written on their website, limiting “maximum resale premium” unless the business is handled “via the Internet or by a ticket broker duly licensed by the City of Philadelphia.”

And while a $20 voucher is negligible when considering how much money changes hands in these types of transactions, it was the idea of encouraging the resale of postseason tickets that irked Bobby and others.

I asked a dozen season ticket holders if they got the same email, and some did, some did not, so it didn’t go out as a batch email to all STH. It could have been sent to those who had sold their regular season tickets at some point earlier this year, or maybe to those who opted-in and put in deposits on the NLDS, NLCS, and World Series.


Which brings us to a confession:

Bobby mentioned, that one month earlier, they got an email from the Phillies warning them of too many tickets being sold on the secondary market, which could result in punishment:

Bobby didn’t dispute this, explaining that it’s the Phillies’ right to place restrictions on resellers. But they found it funny to receive an email, one month later, offering a $20 promo code to sell tickets on the secondary market. That’s “something they just basically punished me for last month,” said Bobby, noting that the two competing ideas are “completely absurd.”

Bobby did reiterate that the offer came from the Phillies via MLB.com, so this was probably a league initiative. Last year, Seat Geek replaced StubHub as the official Ticket Marketplace of Major League Baseball, so there’s obviously a partner connection and business aspect to all of this. Nobody here is so naive as to not see the resale market profiteering through the trees, and Phillies sales department employees probably recognize that it looks a little corny when you juxtapose the two emails we’ve shared in this story. There are probably plenty of folks at CBP who are also scratching their heads. It’s like warning people of the dangers of smoking, then offering a Joe Camel t-shirt with your next cigarette purchase.

Of course, there’s a larger-level season ticket holder discussion that takes place whenever this topic comes up. STH are customers, and the customer has every right in the world to do what they’d like to do with their tickets. Not everybody resells because they’re trying to make a profit. Maybe you were interested in NLDS seats, but you’ve got a conflict that night, so you list on Seat Geek and unfortunately some Padres fan ends up with the tickets, because that’s what’s innnnnnnn. Or maybe the playoff resale pays for next year’s regular season. But there also exists a general disdain for season ticket holders that don’t actually go to the games, because they’re not “true fans” and they “don’t have a soul,” as one person told me. If you take that latter belief, then throw a resale incentive into the mix, the whole thing does feel a little bit cringe, does it not? It feels a little bush league, like something the Marlins would do if they ever made the playoffs.