The frugal fan

Phil Gurnee ♦ April 6, 2017 ♦ 4 Comments

Just how inexpensive can you make a trip to Dodger stadium and still sit in premium seats? I intended to find out today.

Using SeatGeek I was looking for one ticket in the Field Box and was willing to pay around $15 – 20 knowing full well that no matter where the seat was, that a Thursday day game would have plenty of empty seats. I perused the seats on Wednesday night but decided to wait until Thursday morning feeling that many tickets would go unsold and thus would suffer from pricing pressure. At 09:00 AM,  I checked the tickets and found most of the tickets I had been looking at were gone. Yikes. I had to do some errands and went back to check at 10:00 AM.  Lots of tickets in the reserve but the normal field box tickets in the corners were unavailable.  I found a $10 loge ticket around section 150 and went for it. I brought up the seatgeek app to see if the ticket had appeared but the confirmed box was not lit up, just the order. As I got ready to leave at 11:00 it was still unconfirmed.

Do I leave without a confirmed ticket?

Yeah, what the hell, I could always find another ticket so off I went. While I was driving to the game I hit some traffic and checked the SeatGeek app and found the ticket gone. The owner had declined so I was going to have to find another ticket.  I wasn’t going to pay for parking since it was a day game and parking would be available in Elysian Park. With the Scott Road gate opening back up a few years ago it had become easy to park below and walk up to Scott Road into the stadium entrance. I’m a walker, I like to walk whenever I can, but today it was about being frugal.

I still needed a ticket so brought up the SeatGeek app and still no decent seats in the Field Box or Loge that I was willing to pay for. Even the reserve had little to offer so I switched my search options to two tickets instead of one and a plethora of options were spread out before me. I purchased two Reserve tickets for $3 bucks a piece but I didn’t want to sit in the reserve today.  I was hoping to meet someone in the field box and couldn’t do that with a reserved ticket.

Or could I?

I remembered going to a game last year with David Young who had reserve tickets but we entered at the field box level. He said he does it all the time and that you just have to tell the ticket folk that you have a bum knee and need to use the elevator.  I’m not a fan of pretending to be something I’m not and soon enough I really will need the elevator but today seemed like a perfect day to game the system.

It worked just fine and I entered on the field level and found a sweet seat in row K Sec 27 with plenty of seats to move around if the actual owners of those tickets showed up. They never did so I got to spend the whole game in excellent seats. Because I was trying to make a point about how inexpensive taking in a game could be I didn’t buy anything. That was brutal because I really wanted a few beers. Where was Bobby and the beers he owes me? Or the myriad of other bets that no one has ever paid off?

Anyway, let’s look at the tally:

Tickets – $6

Parking – $0

Gas – $12

Grand total – $18

Watching Puig hit two absolute laser shots into the Dodger bullpen – Priceless