John Oliver Knocks the Yankees Down a Peg

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If there’s one thing I’m not a fan of, it’s the New York Yankees. Ever since I was a kid, they were a lot like the Justice League. They won all the time, they had all the cool things you always wanted as a normal person, they were the focal point of Major League Baseball. They still are, but to a lesser degree. But they did announce something that bugs me as a fan in 2016. The Yankees stated that they would be eliminating the print-at-home option for tickets back in February.

In comes one of my favorite ways to start off my week: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Now I would normally post the video source, but it has some language that I wouldn’t put on this site or any other, so head here with your own discretion to see what I’m talking about. He talked about Yankees COO Lonn Trost who went on radio to defend the policy and came off as an elitist.

The problem below market at a certain point is that if you buy a ticket in a very premium location and pay a substantial amount of money. It’s not that we don’t want that fan to sell it, but that fan is sitting there having paid a substantial amount of money for a ticket and [another] fan picks it up for a buck-and-a-half and sits there, and it’s frustrating to the purchaser of the full amount.

And, quite frankly, the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.

So during Last Week Tonight, John Oliver he would have a contest for the so-called “riffraff” where he would give the winners a pair of tickets right behind home plate for a whopping 25 cents. All you had to do was post a photo dressed as if you’ve never sat in a “premium location” using the following hashtag: #IHaveNeverSatInAPremiumLocation. And it worked like gangbusters. Here’s a few of the best ones.

https://twitter.com/jamespmack/status/716963033587781632

And then this gem showed up during the first game of the season between the Astros and the Yankees on Tuesday.

Those were the winners of the first pair of tickets. And apparently there is another winner out there tonight.

It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

-Clint Domingue