The worst team in baseball is scheduled to send out season-ticket renewal letters on Thursday, and everyone was pretty curious what pitch the White Sox were possibly going to try to make.
Turns out the answer was pretty obvious.
“There’s a price reduction,” White Sox chief revenue officer Brooks Boyer told a small collection of reporters Wednesday. “The average reduction is going to be 10 percent. It’s not a flat 10 percent, there will be variations.”
“When you look at kind of the rolling two years of what’s been going on, it made sense to us” Boyer continued. “Looking at the analytics around this, it absolutely makes sense to lower the prices.”
What’s been going on is a number of things, but the Sox are having the worst season of their 124-year history and probably the worst MLB season of all-time. Already primed by an 101-loss 2023, attendance has sagged to the point where the Sox only recently cleared one million fans for the season, and will probably finish below the 1,338,851 they drew in attendance in 1999; the worst attended season in the history of Guaranteed Rate Field. Boyer also acknowledged the name of the stadium might also change, since Guaranteed Rate has recently rebranded to just “Rate,” but that’s an unsettled matter for another time.
Season-ticket renewals are the impetus for making this announcement (that first payment deadline is Sept. 30, don’t forget), even though the price reduction will filter down across the board. But the manner in which the miserable value White Sox tickets receive on the secondary market was also a factor that Boyer addressed.
“We see what tickets go for on the secondary marketwith our season-ticket holders,” Boyer said. “We want our season-ticket holders to be able to make some money if they decide that’s how they want to fund their season tickets. We took all of it into consideration. With the crowds and the product we had on the field have struggled.”
Boyer said the White Sox don’t want to fall into a pattern of keeping prices flat after bad years, and jacking them up in response to good years, because that punishes fans for winning seasons. But obviously the miserable 2024 performance informs an expected decrease in fan interest in 2025. Additionally, with the Sox not expecting any sort of high-speed return to contention, Boyer said he spoke to the front office about the outlook for next season before making this decision.
“He can’t tell us free agency or trades or anything like that,” Boyer said. “You just don’t know. But it was something that, when we looked at the data we have, we felt it was necessary.”
It’s also a two-way street, where Boyer communicates the revenue picture to the front office, which informs their operational budget.
“Every year we have those conversations,” Boyer said of communicating with GM Chris Getz. “Some people might be like, ‘Why are you putting this out Aug. 15?’ We kind of like to know going into an offseason where are season-ticket base [is], what it’s going to look like so Chris can make some decisions based on where we think things are going to go.”
None of this paints a particularly rosy picture for the offseason, nor sparks hope of the White Sox spending their way back into relevancy this winter. But anyone who has hazarded a glance at the Sox this season could have gleaned this. Especially if you’re a season-ticket holder, the dire state of the present and immediate future is old news.
At least, the White Sox offer, the tickets will be cheaper.
Boyer said he fully expects a TV booth of John Schriffen and Steve Stone in 2025. Despite rampant criticism, indications that Schriffen will stay on were widespread. But Boyer putting his expectations for Stone to continue on record clears away any anxiety about his contract situation, or speculation about retirement.
“If you listen to the baseball broadcast, they’re really good,” Boyer said. “They are a quality broadcast. Steve Stone is one of the very best in the business. John does a really good job of bringing Steve in and out and letting him be what he is, which is an amazing analyst.”
There were no official details about the future under CHSN that Boyer was ready to share, explaining that their new broadcast partner is focused on readying their production of Bulls and Blackhawks games, which has to be primed to launch later this year. They can more afford to take their time finalizing details of White Sox games.
“We’re looking at a lot of different ways to make our coverage of the White Sox better than it is now, and there’s a lot of different things we’ll be able to do.”
But if the central question is simply whether Chuck Garfien and Ozzie Guillen will be retained to host the pre and post-game show at the new network, Boyer was either being very nice or trying very hard to drop a strong hint.
“We think really, really highly of NBC and who’s on there now.”
James Fegan View all posts
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