Did the Red Sox actually break the law with junk ticketing fees?

Last week, Red Sox fans Damon Campagna, Lily Rose Smith and Patrick Spaulding filed a class-action lawsuit against the team in U.S. District Court, alleging that it charged illegal junk fees from at least 2022 through 2024 and used “drip pricing” to inflate the stated costs for tickets. I believe them.

To be clear, I believed them as soon as I saw the first headline about all this. As I am not a court of law, I am under no obligation to find the team innocent until proven guilty. I relish doing the opposite, in fact. I nonetheless read the criminal complaint. After doing so, I still believe them, but I am now angry.

To be clear, I am not just mad at the Red Sox, who in this writer’s opinion are obviously guilty of the charges, and who stopped the scheme before last season likely because of its obvious illegality and/or because the team was finally good enough, after a self-induced swoon, to render it unnecessary. I am also mad at myself for having paid junk fees like this over and over, having accepted it as the cost of doing business when holding bad actors accountable is at least theoretically possible. 

All of which is to say that the complaint is the extreme, uncut good stuff, and an incredible look at how the team allegedly squeezed money equally from high- and low-priced ticket buyers through what appears to be an algorithmic, inconsistently applied process. The plaintiffs claim there were two interrelated mechanisms at work: “drip-pricing,” in which a good’s full cost is slowly increased throughout the buying process, and “junk fees,” which are exactly what they sound like and include absurdities like “Per-Ticket Fees” and “Order Fees.”

These practices differ insofar as legitimate fees (like taxes) can be used in a drip pricing scheme, but that’s about it. It’s really about the marriage of the two; specifically, it’s about how the team allegedly leveraged “drip pricing” to add variably priced “Per-Ticket Fees” and a flat, usually $7 “Order Fee” to rip off buyers from the front row to the last. The Red Sox, naturally, did not comment on the suit, only saying that they team “always follows the law.” 

It’s a good thing, then, that the complaint covers at least a portion of that silence up front, noting that “the team never even pretended that these fees covered anything of value to buyers independent of the tickets the buyers had already shown interest in purchasing.” It also notes that “Per-Ticket Fees” varied depending on the price of the originally chosen seat – running from $.50 for cheaper options to $8.50 for more expensive ones – and the opponent, correctly saying that “it does not cost the Red Sox more to issue a ticket to a game against the Yankees than to a game against the Brewers,” despite the costs differing. It also takes on the “Order Fees,” flatly stating that “it does not cost the Red Sox $7 to process each” transaction.

All told, the complaint alleges that if the team sold 2.5 million tickets per year with average junk fees of $4 per ticket, they’d have pocketed $6 million in the event that only 20% of inventory was “tainted” this way. Given that the team happened to *coincidentally* close down sales at its Fenway Park box office in 2022 – where one could previously bypass “Order Fees” – that number is likely far closer to 100% than 20% (my words) and “the actual damages are likely far in excess of that amount” (theirs). The complaint says the team’s actions constitute “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” under Massachusetts law.

Putting aside the legal issue, anyone charging an “Order Fee” for the convenience of buying a ticket online is theoretically acting amorally; perhaps it would be one thing for a struggling business to do it, but that doesn’t describe the Red Sox. No matter how the court rules, the team is already guilty of being shitty to its fans. Not was — is. Two tickets to this year’s April 6 game against the Brewers will run you $8.75 each in fees, which are ridiculous even if they are now stated up-front alongside the ostensible “face value” of the ticket. April 22nd against the Yankees? $11.75 each. You get the picture. The Sox have stopped hiding the fact they have extortionate pricing practices, but it doesn’t make them virtuous.

And yet, they’re happy to do business this way, because they think it’s the right way. Maybe it is. Their house, their rules, after all. I don’t expect much will change going forward, but if they lose this lawsuit – and frankly, I don’t know how they’d win it – they’ll just increase the up-front fees going forward to recoup the difference. They say you can’t predict baseball, and in most cases they’re right. This is the exception to the rule. Without legislation and enforcement, the Sox will continue to steal as much from us as they possibly can. It sucks!