World Series Game 6 at Boston’s Fenway Park: Priciest Baseball Tickets Ever

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Tonight, the Boston Red Sox could win the World Series at home for the first time since 1918, and plenty of fans are willing to pay top dollar for the chance to see it happen. The cheapest ticket to get into Fenway Park is now going for around $1,000, and some seats are commanding over $10,000.

Last week, tickets in the bleacher section of Fenway Park for Game 6 of the World Series were selling for about $300. By Monday night, with the series between the Red Sox and the Cardinals tied 2-2, bleacher seats were running $625 when Game 5 got started in St. Louis. When the game was over, ESPN reported, those same tickets were hiked up to a price of $900. Field box seats that were available for $1,400 before the game began were up to $1,900 after the last out was recorded.

By then, of course, the Red Sox had gained a 3-2 edge in the series over the Cardinals, meaning that Boston could be crowned champions as soon as Wednesday night. Though the Red Sox have won two World Series recently, both victories took place on the road. The prospect of seeing the Sox win at home for the first time in nearly a century, combined with Fenway Park’s relatively small seating capacity (38,400), has resulted in ticket prices going off the charts.

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Ticket prices on the secondary market appear to be rising by the minute. Businessweek noted that as of Tuesday evening that the cheapest (standing-room-only) admission cost $736, and that the average price for a ticket was $1,024, according to ticket search engine SeatGeek.com. By Wednesday morning, $983 was the price for the cheapest available tickets to Game 6, while the average resale price was up to $1,547. Another ticket site, TiqIQ.com, said the average sale Game 6 ticket price was $1,844 as of Tuesday afternoon, per the Wall Street Journal.

Sellers using the secondary ticket marketplace StubHub were offering standing-room-only admissions starting at around $1,000 on Wednesday morning, and those bleacher seats that were selling for $300 last week were available beginning at $1,095. The asking price for a field box ticket, meanwhile, was over $11,000.

“This is the highest-demand ticket in Boston history, and I believe it is the highest-demand ticket in baseball history,” Jim Holzman, president of Boston-based Ace Ticket, told the Wall Street Journal. “The demand has just been crazy.”

“There’s a lot of people with a lot of money willing to spend,” Red Sox manager John Farrell said, according to Boston.com. Normally, when baseball insiders say something like this, they’re referring to the owners of teams like the Yankees and the Dodgers. In this instance, however, Farrell was talking about Red Sox fans. “From a historic perspective, when you consider that an event like this hasn’t been here in a couple of generations, there’s a lot of people that are willing to take some extra cash and try to be a part of it.”

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In more recent history, it’s amazing to note just how far the Red Sox organization has come in a short period of time in terms of fan engagement. At the start of this season, Fenway Park lowered prices on beer and food and even gave out free kids’ meals because owners were so worried fans wouldn’t show up for what was then considered a mediocre, uninspiring team.