'Cheap' World Series tickets for sale!
With the Phillies on the verge of elimination, online ticket resellers report steep drop in asking prices for Monday night's Game 5. But average price still $373.
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| New York Yankees fans show off their tickets before game 1 of the World Series. |
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The World Series may not be over, but many fans of the defending Philadelphia Phillies are apparently giving up, leading to a plunge in the asking price for tickets being sold through ticket reselling Web sites.
Ticket search engine FanSnap reported Monday that the average price of tickets listed for sale for Game 5 in Philadelphia has fallen about 39% since Sunday night. FanSnap said there have been 2,000 tickets put up for sale during that time, swelling the supply of tickets for sale to almost 6,000.
Christian Anderson, spokesman for FanSnap, said that ticket prices for playoff games this postseason have typically edged higher as game time approaches unless there was bad weather. That's not the case for what could be the last game of the World Series on Monday.
The price for Game 5 tickets are down an average of 60% since Friday morning. The Phillies lost games 3 and 4 to the New York Yankees on Saturday and Sunday.
Yankees fan Nathan Thompson, a physician from Manhattan, said he bought two tickets for Monday's game at a price of $220 each early Monday. He said asking prices for the same seats in the rooftop bleacher section had been as high as $800 last week and that prices changed throughout Sunday's game, depending on the score.
"When the Yankees went ahead, the price went down; when they Phillies tied it up, all of a sudden, the prices went back up," he said. "When we woke up this morning the prices were about half of where they were last night."
Ticket reselling site StubHub, a unit of online auction site eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500), reported similar trends. It said that the average price of a Game 5 ticket purchased on the site fell to $373 during the day Monday. That's down 31% from the purchase price from as recently as Sunday.
Even with Cliff Lee, the Phillies' best pitcher and winner of Game 1 of the Word Series, set to pitch Monday night, apparently many Phillies fans with tickets don't want to risk watching the Yankees celebrate a championship at Citizens Bank Park.
The Phillies are now down three games to one in the best-of-seven series, putting the Yankees on the cusp of its first championship since 2000. 
