Nats seats a steep buy in secondary markets

First came the Washington Nationals. Now comes the profiteering.

With the team’s home opener still two months away, the secondary market for tickets has quickly mushroomed and begun to show aggressive pricing not seen locally since Michael Jordan’s final games in a Washington Wizards uniform.

Across several channels, including online marketplaces such Stubhub.com, EBay, and craigslist.org, and local ticket brokers, top seats for the Nationals’ April 14 home opener against Arizona are fetching as much as $1,250 each.

Even random midseason contests at RFK Stadium are being sold for four and five times face values that peak at $90 per seat. The clamor even extends to Space Coast Stadium in Viera, Fla., where spring training tickets are reaching $80 a pop, far above the listed prices of $5 to $18 a game.

“Right now, we’re still doing more tickets per day for the Wizards than the Nationals, but this is coming along fast,” said Anthony Rodio, vice president of marketing for Stubhub.com. “I expect the Nationals to be quite a decent ticket for us.”

The ticket frenzy arrives as the Nationals have wrestled with several recent hiccups in selling full- and partial-season tickets. Numerous purchasers of full-season tickets complained they were not given priority over those who registered for seats after them.

And last week’s sales of partial-season tickets were bogged down initially by overloads to Ticketmaster’s online servers, fueled by fans reserving far more seats than they eventually purchased.

The Nationals will not begin single-game ticket sales until next month and have not yet established a distribution process for the much-desired home opener, though a lottery for remaining available seats is the most likely option. Those factors, combined with classic capitalism, has prompted the accelerating rush for seats.

The rebirth of the Nationals from a team nobody wanted to see to one nobody can do without also comes at a time when states and municipalities across the country increasingly are having trouble policing ticket scalping because of the exponential increase of online sellers.

Nationals president Tony Tavares said policing the secondary ticket market is not a front-burner priority for the team. The stance is not surprising because the Nationals are still racing against the clock to sign local broadcast deals, help guide the renovation of RFK Stadium to completion and establish themselves in their new home without the benefit of a normal ownership structure.

“This happens with every team in baseball. It’s unfortunately sort of the nature of the beast,” Tavares said. “But if we find someone is using our tickets solely as a profit venture, we reserve the right to pull those tickets.”