Master ticket scalper bucks trend, profits from Spring Training games
When Dean Prutos first resold baseball game tickets, he made a 100 percent profit, wheeling and dealing 50-cent bleacher seats at Wrigley Field in Chicago for $1 during the week and $3 on Sundays.
Dean was 13.
Now 56, the part-time Naples resident loves spring training because he can sleep in his Florida home with a short commute to his game-day spring office at 13480 Rickenbacker Parkway. The grass parking lot adjacent to the Daniels Parkway strip mall anchored by the Norman Love chocolate factory is a short walk from JetBlue Park, spring training home of the Boston Red Sox. It's also an ideal location to resell tickets.
“We have to buy our tickets at cheaper prices in order to make a profit,” Prutos said. “With Stubhub and other internet sources, there are no secrets anymore. We buy and sell on Stubhub ourselves.”
The internet has disrupted many businesses and altered how consumers do just about everything. This includes buying tickets.
When the Minnesota Twins arrived to Hammond Stadium in 1991, and when the Red Sox arrived to City of Palms Park in 1993, there were fewer than a handful of ways to buy tickets: On the phone, at the box office, with mail-in season ticket orders. Or, covertly, fans could find scalpers on game days.
“When I started, scalping was illegal in 50 states,” said Prutos, who has past legal trouble for doing just that.
But in 2006, Florida law changed. Scalping became legal except for at the venue, as described in Florida statute 817.36. Before that, tickets could be resold for no more than $1 above face value.
By the time the Red Sox moved into the Fenway South Complex in 2012, the secondary ticket market had changed. It continues to evolve. Prutos is in good legal standing with his business, which he named Executive Tickets.
The Red Sox and Twins encourage and discourage the resale of tickets.
The teams discourage it in person, hiring 22 to 28 Lee County sheriff deputies per game at $40 to $50 an hour ($50 to $60 an hour for a supervisor) to thwart in-person ticket sellers in the stadium parking lots and especially near the ticket windows. The deputies are also on hand to help direct traffic and provide security.
"If we witness it or it is brought to our attention, we remind the individual that it is illegal to sell tickets for more than face value on the Twins and Red Sox properties and that they need to leave the particular property to do so," said Tony Schall, public information officer for the Lee County Sheriff Office. "If they are a repeat offender, they will likely be trespassed from the property. Any subsequent violation would result in arrest."
But the teams encourage the secondary market online.
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Major League Baseball has a business affiliation with Stubhub, which started in 2004 and went mainstream in 2007 after being purchased by Ebay. The site allows fans and scalpers to buy, sell and resell tickets to concerts and sporting events.
In 2016, the Red Sox set up their own site to do the same thing, redsoxreplay.com. Red Sox ticket holders are still welcome to use Stubhub, but Red Sox Replay provides tailored customer service with Red Sox season ticket holders, said Ron Bumgarner, Red Sox senior vice president of ticketing, Fenway events and concerts.
“Our goal with Red Sox Replay is to better serve Red Sox fans by providing a platform specifically designed for Red Sox games and Fenway Park,” Bumgarner said.
The Red Sox also serve themselves by charging a 15 percent per ticket fee and a $5 fee per transaction on the site. This means the Red Sox can profit in assisting with the resale of a ticket the organization already sold.
Minnesota Twins Vice President of Ticket Operations Paul Froehle has been with the team for three decades and seen all of these changes. The majority of spring training ticket sales, he said, happen online these days. The Twins also have installed four ticket kiosks outside Hammond Stadium, which are automated and open 24/7.
Problems sometimes occur when those sales take place on sites other than twinsbaseball.com, Froehle said.
In addition to Stubhub, a litany of similar resale sites continue to appear online. Prutos said he owns 12 or 13 such sites.
“Anybody can create a site to sell tickets,” Froehle said. “You can’t stop that.
“Sometimes we get a fan who has lost a ticket. If the fan bought them through us, we can reissue them a ticket pretty easily.”
That task becomes a challenge if a fan bought the ticket from another entity.
Over the past decade, the trend of buying and reselling tickets online made in-person scalpers almost obsolete. But Prutos figured out how to adapt. As with any business, he only fares as well as the supply and demand allow.
“It’s cyclical,” said Prutos, wearing a Tampa Bay Lightning cap and sitting near a shaded tent at the entrance to his parking lot. “Not every game is the same. We’re really a victim of the calendar this year. People are just starting to get here, and they’ve already had four games.
“Buy low, sell high. I know that sounds vague, but it’s pretty basic. My motto is, "Nothing’s ever sold out." There’s always a price to get in.”
On Thursday, while the Red Sox were struggling to sell out a game against the Tampa Bay Rays at JetBlue Park, Prutos was struggling to sell out the 50 or so tickets he had.
“I don’t need to go to a casino,” he said. “I don’t have to play blackjack, because I’m gambling every day.”
Ed Suchcicki, a Cape Coral resident, and his friends Kevin Butler and Glenn Eckert bought three tickets from Prutos for $25 each. They saved a combined $15 on the $30 face value price, plus they didn’t have to pay any fees, and they saved $5 on parking.
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Prutos wasn’t accepting offers for tickets from people stuck with extras. For popular games, Prutos purchases them from passers-by at a negotiated low price, then resells them moments later for a higher one.
Nick Riccio, a part-time Lee County resident who has season tickets, had a pair of seats in section 101, row five, behind home plate. He asked Prutos how much he wanted for the $33 face value tickets. Prutos turned him down.
“I could hold them up like this,” Riccio said raising his hand in the air with the pair of tickets, “and you can’t even give them away.”
Riccio said he bought season tickets for 19 spring training games for $1,305. He sold eight pairs of those on Stubhub, marking them up.
“I get the 11 games for free because of Stubhub. It’s killing Deano here.”
Prutos shrugged. He still has a market, and it’s one he keeps secure.
Connect with this reporter: David Dorsey (Facebook), @DavidADorsey (Twitter).