Sports Tickets

So, you want to buy sports tickets and check out a game in your home town? Let's do the math. There are four major sports franchises: Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL). In a perfect world of no labor disputes, each league plays an entire season's worth of games--162 for baseball, 16 for football, 82 for basketball and hockey.

Now suppose that you live in a major sports town. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Minnesota, Denver, Detroit, Atlanta, and now Washington D.C. all have four sports teams. Depending on how you ally yourself regionally, Miami, Boston, and Denver enter the mix too (some of their local sports teams, such as the Colorado Avalanche or New England Patriots, retain state or regional names).

Procuring Local Sports Tickets

It's also a fair assumption that any team will play half of its games on the road and half at home. In baseball, that's 81 games, in football it's eight, in hoops and hockey it's 41. All in all, then, if you live in any of the aforementioned 12 cities, some 171 opportunities exist to catch a live game. At an average of, say, 40,000 seats per arena (baseball and football venues tend to be bigger, while basketball and hockey arenas skew smaller), that equates to nearly seven million places to put your keister.

The point of the exercise is to illustrate just how many chances you're presented with each year to catch your local squad. Parents frequently complain that it's impossible to find reasonably priced seats for an entire family outing, which is patently untrue. With seven million vacancies, there are always bargains, especially during your teams' "rebuilding" years.