Yankees to public: Get your $15 bleacher seats!

Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl

The New York Yankees are raising the prices of some of their most expensive tickets for next year after making big cuts in 2010, and are hiking the cost of bleacher seats for only the third time in 13 years.

The price of the best field-level seats will rise to $260 as part of season ticket plans, the team said Monday. Those seats cost $250 this year, down from $325 when new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009.

Seats which had been slashed from $325 to $235 will remain unchanged, as will many other seats in the field level. Toward the outfield, tickets that had been $100 will rise to $110, and tickets that had been $75 will go up to $80.

Upper deck prices remain unchanged. Bleacher seats that had been $12 increase to $15, while $5 bleacher seats remain the same.

Lonn Trost, the team’s chief operating officer, said 53 percent of the non-premium seats remain unchanged next year. To determine prices, the team examined the resale amounts of tickets on StubHub.com.

“We’re not trying to take away the ability of fans to make a profit when they resell tickets,” he said, “but the ones where we raised prices were not selling for just above face, but were far above face.”

The 1,704 non-premium seats in the two sections on each side of the Delta suite — sections 216-217 and 223-224 — will remain unchanged after increasing from $100 to $125 last year. Seats on the main level that had been $100 will rise to $110, and remaining main level seats will go up $5 each to $50, $65 and $80.

Fans willing to make multiyear commitments, however, can get lower prices, Trost said. The $260 seats drop to $240 next year with a three-year contract, $230 with a five-year contract and $220 with a 10-year contract — with the provision they can rise 4.5 percent annually.

“You have price protection and price certainty,” he said.

Faced with empty seats in the priciest sections in the $1.5 billion ballpark’s first season, the Yankees announced 2010 price cuts of up to $1,250 per seat per game on Sept. 15 last year, more than a month before winning the team’s 27th title. This year, New York lost to Texas in the AL Championship Series.

New York averaged a major league-leading 46,491 for 81 regular-season home games, up from 45,918 in the stadium’s opening season, when New York was second to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Total attendance this year was 3.77 million, up from 3.72 million.

Trost said prices of 2011 premium seats, including the pricey Legends Suite seats that have cost up to $2,625 per game at the new ballpark, will be determined within a few weeks.