White Sox mete out a bit more season-ticket pricing data

The White Sox made a big announcement in October that they planned to slash ticket prices with reckless abandon, with a specific focus on lowering the minimum price to access the park, and to sit in non-premium seats.  Cuts in 30% range were promised for many outfield seats, with the qualifier that more specific numbers about season and single-game ticket prices would be needed to see exactly how these cuts would shake out.

Monday, team ticket representatives came calling to all partial-season ticket holders to trot out their 27-game plans for 2013, and it’s time to compare promises to results.

That’s ripped right from the White Sox promotional email. I’m pretty sure they won’t mind.  Confusing baseball-themed names aside, these plans are distinct simply in the sense that Hit & Run is a 27-plan composed of weekend dates, and Double Play is made up of weekdays. They’re the same price now, and the White Sox want us to know that, because they have eliminated the pricing tiers based on days of the week.

That certainly lives up to the billing for the 32% and 30% promised for bleachers and outfield reserved, even accounting for  the typical extra dollar for single-game seats. Absent from this breakdown is anything about the lower section between sections 119 and 145, or the club sections, or the corner outfield sections.

The club and prime box areas are obviously targeted at a higher price point and not part of this initiative to pull in more casual fans, but the corner outfield sections are. They’re somewhat shoddy seats–the closest thing U.S. Cellular has to obstruction seating–so it might make more sense to keep it as a single game $20 ticket to the lower section than try to sucker someone into buying it 27 times. Or they’ll just be addressed in a later release. I’m betting on that one.

A cool $567 is enough to tempt me into committing to 27 games in the bleachers, but schedule uncertainty makes such a large commitment hard. Still, this is some encouraging stuff so far. There’s still approximately $40 in ticket fees to tack on to all of these totals, and perhaps one might want to wait until after the White Sox have decided what the hell they’re doing in 2013 before throwing out c-notes like a lawn sprinkler.  No one wants to spend $600 on bleacher seats only to immediately afterward find out that Paul Konerko’s been traded to the glue factory for cash considerations.

Let’s end on that note.

Follow James Fegan on Twitter @JRFegan