For the second straight year, the price for a ticket to Fenway Park will stay the same. This on the back of a 69-93 season and following the dramatic collapse in 2011 that precipitated the first price freeze.
The freeze in ticket prices is across the board, and hardly comes as a surprise. It would have been especially hard to justify a price bump given the massive unloading of contracts undertaken in August, and while the Sox officially have kept their sellout streak alive, it stands on technicalities only. We saw more and more empty seats as the year went on, the playoffs slipped away, and the roster got more and more pathetic.
If the Sox can reverse course in 2013, provide a winning product, and bring people back to the park to the point where the empty seats are sparse and not clearly a matter of mountains of tickets gathering dust with resellers, then this won't end up being a problem. If they strugle, however--and in Boston, that can mean as little as finishing in the vicinity of 85-77--then it could be unfamiliar territory for ownership. Said resellers will certainly be less interested in buying out the park if they expect to have the same difficulty finding buyers.
In fact, we might finally get to stop hearing about that streak in 2013 if the resellers enter the year appropriately wary. While it's a lot easier to put up with during boom times, even when the team is at its best the streak is a grating bit of self-aggrandizement that we could all probably do without.