Red Sox ticket prices to stay the same (until 2016)

The Red Sox will not be increasing their ticket prices for the 2016 season...until 2016 proper, when they'll bump them up by 1.4%.

New tactic for the #RedSox: ticket prices unchanged but only though Dec. 31. Then average 1.4 percent increase.

— Pete Abraham (@PeteAbe) October 8, 2015

Well, it's certainly an interesting approach to ticket pricing. Call it a faith discount, or a tax on those without, or just on folks who can't nail down their travel plans until later in the year. Call it what you will, the message is clear: the Red Sox want you to buy early.

Whether you should or not is entirely up to you, of course, but the Red Sox' decision to raise prices at all does say something about the organization's confidence. After their disappointing 2014 season, the Red Sox froze ticket prices aside from making a few changes in their variable game pricing structure that more or less evened out. Again in 2015 the Red Sox put a last-place team on the field, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect another freeze.

But, if 1.4 percent isn't much of an increase, it's something. Maybe Dave Dombrowski has confidence he'll put together some flashy offseason moves before January to justify the bump (hopefully ones that prove more successful than last year's series of flashy disasters). Maybe they're just basing this on the strong performances of young players that actually made the team worth watching in the last couple months of the season.

Whatever the case, hopefully the 2016 Red Sox will be more than 1.4% better than their 2015 counterparts.