Rockies home opener still isn’t sold out and ticket prices seem silly

The Colorado Rockies slogan was once a proud “Catch The Fever,” encouraging people across the region to become baseball fans of Denver’s Nine. Now there’s a fever around Coors Field and it seems people are keen on not catching this one.

The Rockies are coming off their first triple-digit loss season and have begun this campaign with a 1-5 record, getting outscored by a league-worst 33 runs. Colorado has one more game in Chicago before launching their home slate on Friday and with just 48 hours or so until first pitch of the Home Opener, there are still plenty of seats available.

On the Rockies official ticketing site, there appear to be at least 100 seats left unsold—the catch is the price is exorbitant. The cheapest seat for the festivities and some sub-par baseball is $80 pre-fee and will net you an upper-deck seat. But there are even $255 seats just five rows behind the dugout still for sale on the official first-party vendor Ticketmaster. Tickets in the same section again against the Tampa Bay Rays on Saturday are $23 and $85 respectively and drop even further to $15 and $48 for Wednesday’s matchup with the reigning National League Champion Arizona Diamondbacks.

For context, a Nuggets third-deck playoff seat for the first round last year was about $50.

Of course, these tickets are just through the team itself and there are still so many seats within reach on places like StubHub and GameTime. This raises real questions about if Friday’s game will be a sellout.

Rockies attendance has long been really good despite the team only being strong just a few seasons out of their 32 years of play. In the last season before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rockies drew 36,953 fans a night, sixth-best in baseball. In 2022, that number was still holding strong at ninth-best at 32,467 fans. But last season saw a big drop off to just 14th and 32,196 fans per game.

Last year saw 48,230 fans come through Coors Field for the home opener and combing through boxscores quickly shows that even the most banal era of Rockies baseball prior to this one in the mid-2000s saw at least 47,000 fans for every Opening Day in Denver. Though they would sell Opening Day tickets coupled with another game on the slate of 81 games so these numbers are a tad inflated. Friday will likely see at least 47,000 folks announced but the atmosphere in LoDo may be a bit more dull than usual. This emphasizes even more just how much the day is a holiday in the Mile High City but the fact there are still tickets available speaks to just how unaffordably priced the tickets are and how disinterested the city is with their sickly ballclub, who are shaping up to have yet another last-place season.