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Premium Nats Tickets to Rise
Construction continues for the new Washington Nationals Ballpark in Southeast which is set to open in April 2008.
(Ricky Carioti - The Washington Post)
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The first 500 seats that arc behind home plate at the new stadium are called Presidential Seats and will cost $400 each for the front row and $300 for the rest. All 500 tickets include food and (nonalcoholic) drinks at a restaurant behind the seats. One section back are the 1,300 Diamond Seats, at $150 each. The rest of the 24,000 seats in the lower bowl start at $29 for a partial season ticket plan and run to $60 for seats behind the dugouts.
The highest ticket price for a Baltimore Orioles game at Camden Yards, by comparison, is $65, according to the team's Web site.
"It's disappointing to see the home dugout box seats [at the new Nationals stadium] stretch two sections past the dugout, with a top price of $60," said Jeff Greenberg of Ascticket.com, a Bethesda-based ticket broker. "Whereas a comparable seat at Camden Yards is $30."
"Keep in mind, we all want to do as well as we can," Kasten said. "We want to make the most money we can. We want to have as many customers there. We want to make the stadium as good as it can be, which costs money. And we want to have the best team we can have, which costs money. And we want to do all of this while also keeping our game affordable."
Billionaire developer Theodore N. Lerner and his family purchased the Nationals from Major League Baseball last year for $450 million, one of the highest prices ever paid for a baseball team.
The Nationals' 2007 payroll is about $38 million, among the lowest in baseball. But the team has said it will spend heavily to sign the players it picks in the MLB draft this week. The team also has said it is investing heavily in its minor league system.
D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), who voted against the city financing the stadium, said he understood the financial pressures on owners of baseball teams, whose players earn an average of $3.25 million per year.
"The Nationals baseball organization has to make tough business decisions when setting ticket prices, and I am grateful for their past generosity in making tickets available to those who may otherwise be unable afford them, particularly children's groups," Fenty said. "I look forward to working with the Sports and Entertainment Commission and the Nationals to continue that tradition when the team moves to the new stadium."
Staff writers Barry Svrluga and David Nakamura and staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
