Philly Sports: What about the money I already spent on tickets?

We all miss Philly sports, but many people are missing the money that they already spent on tickets even more.

I guess I’m kind of lucky right now that I don’t have season tickets to any Philly sports teams, and I didn’t go hog wild over the last few months snatching up tickets to a bunch of games. I did, however, purchase some tickets for what should have been the Phillies’ trip to Wrigley Field to take on the Chicago Cubs later this week: a pair for one game and three for another game. And while I can’t blame StubHub for holding my money currently (as well as the money that millions of others already forked over for thousands of impacted events), it’s still a frustrating situation.

More from Section 215

This whole thing becomes even worse if you get impacted in the form of losing your job or being furloughed/laid off/whatever you want to call it, as you would greatly prefer to have the money back that you already spent on tickets rather than having StubHub, SeatGeek, or the teams themselves holding your money as part of a future credit or saying that your tickets will be valid in the event of a game being rescheduled, as they’re currently saying.

Rescheduled? Come on.

Nothing already on the books will be legitimately “rescheduled”, as NBA and NHL late regular season and playoff games will happen in neutral sites with no fans, if they happen at all. And this whole MLB season is up in the air, likely only happening in the Arizona quarantine situation if it ever does.

Is StubHub (and Major League Baseball, I suppose) going to try and tell me that an August 23 game that the Phillies end up playing against the Cubs in Arizona is the official “rescheduling” of an April game at Wrigley that I bought tickets for? I can’t say for sure that they won’t, although I’d like to believe that they’d be more aboveboard than that and actually give me a site credit for 120% of what I’ve already spent on tickets with them, as they’ve said they do for “canceled events”.

This is going to get really tricky, and I wouldn’t want to be the person to decide that some game happening months later in a different site with no fans constitutes a “rescheduling” simply because the same two teams are playing each other. I appreciate that teams and ticket sites are running businesses for profits, but they are going to need to be exceedingly careful with how they treat the paying public right now. I’d only be out a few hundred dollars, which would stink, but it’s a far cry from what many others would lose if they didn’t end up either getting that money back or at least being able to use it on future events, whenever there are games to speak of.

The economic impact of this will last for an exceedingly long time, and hopefully many loyal fans aren’t priced out because their financial situations have taken a turn for the worse. In the meantime, I’ll try to be patient as I wait for StubHub to process my site credit, because I know that I’m just one of many affected. I urge all of you to do the same, but I do feel awful that people have money that they could use right now tied up in games that will never happen. It’s just one more frustration on top of everything else going on right now, and it will surely make people re-think spending this kind of money in advance in the future, which doesn’t bode well for the sports industry.