If you’ve followed baseball at all this year, you know the Boston Red Sox-New York Yankees rivalry has serious juice. Both clubs are very good — Boston has the best record in Major League Baseball; New York has the third-best — and don’t seem to like each other very much.
But how do we quantify that “juice”? One useful metric is how much it will cost you to watch them play.
According to the event ticket search engine TicketIQ, the “get-in price” on the secondary ticket market for this weekend’s four-game Red Sox-Yankees series at Fenway Park is $82. That’s the highest get-in price of any regular-season Sox-Yanks series in Boston since 2011, per TicketIQ, which aggregated ticket prices on AceTicket.com earlier this week.
Boston and New York were locked in a tight division race in August of the 2011 season (Terry Francona’s last with the Red Sox), so it makes sense why secondary-market tickets rose to $95 a pop.
But it’s noteworthy that this 2018 series is right behind that. High ticket prices are a direct result of high demand, and it appears demand to watch Red Sox-Yankees is as high as it has been in seven years.
Of course, this isn’t great news for Red Sox fans mindful of their wallets. Those “get-in prices” are mostly for standing-room-only tickets, and the average ticket price for a normal seat at Fenway during this series is $208, per TicketIQ.
If you’re content to watch at home, though, you’ll likely be pleased by the buzz surrounding these clubs after a recent lull in the iconic rivalry. The 2017 season was the first time both clubs reached the playoffs in the same year since 2009, and interest started picking up late last summer: The August 2017 Red Sox-Yankees series ranks third on this list with a get-in price of $79.
Boston and New York will meet again at Fenway in September for the final three games of the season, so if the American League East title is on the line, expect ticket prices to reach or even surpass 2011 levels.
