The Phillies season started yesterday with a 7-3 victory against the Washington Nationals. It didn't look like it was going to be a good day for the Fightins for most of the game. Nationals pitcher MacKenzie Gore struck out 13 batters while giving up just one hit and no walks through the first six innings. The Nats went to their bullpen in the top of the 7th and the Phillies beat up on five Washington relievers to win in extra innings.
Getting shut down by a league average starter who led all of baseball in wild pitches last season and has yet to finish a season with more wins than losses is not exactly an inspiring performance from this Phillies lineup. It's especially concerning coming off of another early playoff exit last season which saw the Mets exploit the Phillies free-swinging tendencies at breaking pitches outside of the strike zone. The Phillies had the fourth highest chase rate in 2024, which was highlighted in a mid-September series against the Brewers in which they struck out 40 times in three games, including back-to-back games in which Phillies batters struck out sixteen times. The Mets had them well scouted, striking out 41 batters in the NLDS. With this team's reputation for mashing fastballs and chasing every other pitch out of the zone, I'd be shocked if opposing pitchers don't feed the Phillies a steady diet of curveballs, sinkers, and cutters while laying off of the heat.
If I'm being completely honest, I'm not feeling overly enthusiastic for the 2025 season. I expect that the Phillies will have a good season and will reach the playoffs (barring major injuries), but I don't have a lot of hope that they're going to win the World Series. For the most part, they're running back the same team with the same flaws that saw them go down in defeat to the Astros in 2022, the Diamondbacks in 2023, and the Mets in 2024. Three of the four major additions to the team in 2025 are pitchers (starter Jesús Luzardo and relievers Jordan Romano and Joe Ross) who seem more like low risk lottery tickets than the missing piece to a championship. The only new position player is 32 year old left fielder Max Kepler, who is not only another left-handed bat to a lineup that's already a bit too heavy from the left side, but also a career .238 hitter whose best season is now six years behind him. Any one of these guys could be due for a change-of-scenery comeback season, but even in the unlikely event that all four of them have career years, it's not going to fix the problem that saw them get outsmarted in the playoffs for the past three seasons. I hope they prove me wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.
However, my lack of enthusiasm for the 2025 season has less to do with the team itself and more to do with the cost of seeing them play in person.
I reserve the right to change my mind, but I think this is going to be the first season since 2014 (not counting the pandemic) that I don't go down to Philadelphia to see a game. The amount of money that I'd have to spend to see a game at Citizens Bank Park compared to what I'd spend on a night out doing anything else that I enjoy has gotten so out of whack that I just can't justify it to myself anymore.
First of all, parking is $25 and it costs $8 in tolls each way on the Turnpike, so we're already over $40, and that's not counting the cost of gas for the 200 miles round trip, or food and drinks at the ballpark, or ticket prices. Speaking of which...
When I first started going to games, the Phillies published their ticket prices at the start of the season. The cost was determined by how good the seats were. Generally speaking, the closer you were to the field, the more expensive your ticket was. They had a special deal once in a while that brought the price down, but the only way you'd pay any more is if you bought your tickets from a third party, like StubHub or eBay, or from a scalper outside the ballpark.
The Phillies don't publish the cost of their tickets on a list like this anymore because they've adopted Dynamic Ticket Pricing. Prices are set on a wide variety of factors, none of which the customers are informed about other than that it's based on "demand". Some of the factors that go into the cost of your ticket are obvious. For example, tickets to a game on the weekend, an interleague game, or a games against the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers will theoretically cost more than the average game because they're in demand. However, there's no easy way to know how much more these games might cost because the prices of any game can change at any time for any reason, and you aren't told what those prices are until you log into the website and choose a game and a seat. If you log in the next day to choose those same seats at that same game, the cost of your ticket may be higher or lower than it was the day before. You might get lucky and get a halfway decent deal on your tickets, or you might be a sucker who pays twice as much for your seats as the person who you'll be sitting next to. Sounds like fun, huh?
When I go to the ballpark, I prefer to be either behind home plate or on the first base side, but I'm not super picky about how close I am to the field. I've had seats where I was just a few rows from the infield grass, and I've had seats that were in the top row of the 400 section with the fence to the outside of the ballpark at my back. So, when tickets for single games went on sale, I logged in to see how much tickets would be for my birthday. My birthday falls on a Tuesday this year and they're playing the Padres, but there's a fireworks show after the game, so where this combination falls on the team's dynamic pricing hierarchy is anyone's guess.
When I logged in, I headed straight for the nosebleed seats - the 400 section, also known as the Terrace Deck. Specifically, I went to Section 420 which is behind home plate, and I picked two seats in the very last row. We sat in these exact same seats several times over the years. I remembered that because... well.... 420... and because our seats were right next to a beam that kind of made it feel like you were sitting in the corner. Surely there can't be too much demand for a game in the middle of the week in the highest seats in the ballpark (no pun intended)... right?
They're showing today at $65 bucks each, which means a night out at the ballpark on my birthday for my wife and I, including gas, tolls, parking, and food, would cost around $250.
Look, I get it... inflation is a bitch and I can't expect things to cost the same in 2025 that they did in 2011, but this is a Tuesday night game against the Padres... one game out of 162 regular season games that the Phillies will play this season. Unless Zack Wheeler pitches a no-hitter or Bryce Harper hits four home runs, there's a pretty good chance that I wouldn't even remember who won the game by the end of the month without looking back on my blog.
To put the value for your dollar in perspective, the total cost for tickets to the first six nights of the 2025 season at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater comes to $62. That's nine movies across six nights (not counting secret features) at my favorite place in the world to relax and hang out with my friends... all for $3 less than the cost of a single ticket to a Tuesday night game at Citizens Bank Park. I'm sorry, but this isn't even close. Two and a half hours at a ballpark is not worth the same amount of money to me as roughly 30 hours at the drive-in. Even if the drive-in didn't exist, if I'm going to spend $250 bucks on a night out with my wife, I'd rather go to a concert, or go out to a nice dinner and to a museum that she likes, or an aquarium or something like that. Hell, I'd rather go see a minor league game at Reading or Allentown and pocket the difference. The point is that I've reached a point in my life, and the Phillies have reached a point in their pricing, where I just can't justify it anymore. I'm not saying that I've seen my last game at Citizens Bank Park, but unless I hit Powerball or the team drastically reduces their prices, going to a Phillies game has fallen to the bottom of the list of things I'm considering to spend my entertainment budget on.
