By Bill Brubaker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 23, 2005; Page E01

Tickets to the home opening night of the newly born Washington Nationals have become a hot commodity among brokers, with the asking price for lower-deck seats at RFK Stadium topping $1,200 -- nearly 30 times the face value of the ticket -- and a $7 pass to the nosebleed section surpassing $200.

It isn't opening day at Yankee Stadium: Ticket brokers are demanding up to $3,000 for top-notch seats to the New York Yankees' April 3 home opener against their 2004 American League Championship Series conqueror, the Boston Red Sox.

But in hawking the Nationals' opening-night tickets, brokers say that the sense of history is helping drive up the price.

"These prices are high just because this is the first time in 40 years that we've had an opening day here in Washington," said Danny Matta, owner of GreatSeats Inc., a College Park-based brokerage that yesterday had 43 Nationals' opening-night tickets for sale, at prices ranging from $195 to $895 apiece. "Forty years is a long time."

It's actually been 34 years since the Washington Senators left town, but Matta still predicted that as April 14 draws nearer, and the crack of the bat rejoins the cherry blossom as a springtime ritual in the nation's capital, prices may go even higher.

"It's a nice little shot in the arm for me that the Nationals are on the road for the first two weeks of the season," Matta said from his office at College Park Shopping Center. "People will be watching baseball on TV, they'll be watching the Nationals on TV, and they'll be thinking, 'Hey, I want to go to the first game.' "

The Nationals, like other entertainment businesses, can do little more than shrug at the prices being charged by ticket brokers. Though many cities and states, including the District, prohibit scalping -- reselling tickets at above face value without proper permits -- legitimate ticket brokers can acquire seats from the team, season ticket holders or other sources and resell them for whatever price people are willing to pay.

"This is flattering, is what it is," David Cope, the Nationals' sales and marketing director, said of the high ticket prices. "I'd much rather see them selling our tickets for $1,000, than [for] less than face value, I will tell you that. It's exciting to see there's that much demand for our first game."

Cope, in several interviews this week, didn't seem surprised by the high asking prices for the opening-night game (the opponent is the Arizona Diamondbacks).

"There is a reason for this," he said. "You know, President Bush is coming to throw the first pitch. And it's the first regular-season Major League Baseball game in Washington in 34 years. It's a very special event."

Opening-day tickets to the 45,550-seat RFK Stadium are still becoming available at face value, but they are being parceled out slowly, and are not the best in the house.

A team "e-mail lottery" that began at 7 p.m. Saturday and ended at noon yesterday will give 400 fans the option of buying up to four opening-night tickets each. More than 27,000 people registered for the lottery, according to Cope. All agreed on their registration forms not to resell any tickets they won the right to buy.

Today, each lottery winner will get an e-mail from the Nationals with instructions on how to buy these tickets. The tickets will be forfeited if they are not bought tomorrow or Friday.

"The tickets -- in the $7 to $15 range -- will all be upstairs because our season-ticket holders have the downstairs tickets," Cope said.

Asked if the team will enforce the no-resale rule, Cope said: "In the real world? No. I will not be following these 400 people around to enforce that."

An additional 4,500 to 7,500 seats being released on Saturday "will also be upstairs," Cope said.

Want better seats? Brokers with names such as GreatSeats, StageFront Tickets and Coast to Coast Tickets are awaiting your call.

Matta, who began selling tickets in the late 1970s as a student at Bowie High School, said he has sold Nationals' opening-night seats in all prices ranges in recent weeks. He realizes, he said, that the notion of paying $200 for a $7 ticket is distasteful to some.

"But it's not like I buy any of these tickets for $7 and sell them for $150 or $200," he said. "The tickets may pass through a couple of hands, starting with a season-ticket holder, before they get to me. And everybody wants to make money along the way.

"This is still real estate. Any way you want to compare it, it's real estate. Yeah, you don't own this piece of property for the rest of your life, but you own it for three hours."

Matta said he paid about $60 for the $7 "upstairs" tickets he's offering to the Nationals' opening-night game. He, in turn, sells that ticket for about $200. He said he paid about $250 for the $45 "downstairs" tickets, which he offers for between $700 and $900.

Next season's opening-game tickets at RFK probably won't command more than a few hundred dollars, he said.

"Look at the Orioles: Traditionally, we sell their opening-day seats at anywhere from $100 to $300," Matta said.

Marquee teams such as the Yankees are a different breed, Matta said, and their best opening-day seats routinely sell for between $1,000 and $3,000. "There are 17 million people in that [New York] area . . . and everybody wants to see the Yankees," he said.

Don't want to buy from a broker? Then log on to eBay.

Yesterday, an eBay seller in Alexandria was offering two $10 outfield seats to the Nationals' opening-night game. By yesterday afternoon, the tickets had attracted eight bids from four people. The top bid was $300.

"If I carded everyone who wanted to buy tickets and then said, 'How are you going to use them?' I would become the director of sales prevention," Cope said with a laugh. "My goal is to allow as many people as possible to purchase tickets to our games. What they do after they have them, I just can't worry about that. We are in the business of selling tickets."