SeatGeek named official ticket marketplace of MLB

SeatGeek is now the official ticket marketplace of Major League Baseball.

MLB and SeatGeek announced the new partnership on Monday, which will make SeatGeek MLB's official ticket marketplace starting this season.

"SeatGeek is a data-driven company that is relentlessly focused on improving the fan experience from purchase to postgame," MLB chief revenue officer Noah Garden said in a statement. "We're eager to tap into SeatGeek's extensive user base across numerous categories to reach an even wider audience of potential attendees."

MLB's partnership with SeatGeek will make it easier than ever for fans of all ages to buy and sell tickets to MLB games on the secondary market and scan directly into the ballpark.

SeatGeek will be the only marketplace where MLB ticketholders will have one-touch access to sell their tickets. Fans will be able to resell their MLB tickets on SeatGeek with just the tap of a button thanks to ticket barcode integration with the platform.

SeatGeek is replacing StubHub as the official ticket resale partner for MLB. That means baseball ticketholders, including season ticketholders, will now be able to go to their ticket account and manage their tickets -- forward them, sell them directly on SeatGeek and so on.

MLB and SeatGeek are working on reimagining the way baseball fans will sell tickets. One big new feature in the works: Soon, ticketholders will be able to go directly to SeatGeek and the app will know they have tickets for an MLB game; SeatGeek will prepopulate those tickets in the app to make them easier to sell.

There will also be the same tools to manage your tickets as always. Ticketholders can go to the MLB Ballpark app, or online to their ticket account with a club, and select and sell their tickets that way.

Baseball fans will also still be able to use other secondary ticket marketplaces to buy and sell tickets to MLB games. Those tickets will still be verified by MLB, so buyers will know they're getting a valid, legitimate ticket.

SeatGeek could help MLB and the 30 teams reach new audiences and younger fans thanks to its popularity among those younger users. SeatGeek is a top ticketing app for Gen Z -- according to a March 2022 survey from Morning Consult, it had the highest percentage of Gen-Z users among all the major ticketing platforms.

Baseball fans are already more likely to have attended a game in person than any other sport. Over 75 percent of MLB fans have attended a game, according to SSRS/Luker on Trends' Sports Poll for 2013-20 -- more than college football and basketball, the NFL, the NHL and the NBA.

That goes double for younger fans. According to MRI-Simmons' Sports Fan Study in 2022, over twice as many 12-to-17-year-olds have attended a live MLB game vs. NBA games, NFL games or NHL games.

With MLB innovating baseball on the field through 2023 rule changes geared toward making the game more exciting -- a pitch clock, shift limitations and larger bases -- the league also wanted to innovate its ticketing technology. The SeatGeek partnership builds on what MLB has already done to evolve the gameday experience with the MLB Ballpark app, which continues to be one of the top mobile sports apps.

"Baseball is the largest spectator sport in the world in terms of total attendance, and the nature of the league's 162-game season makes it ripe for innovation on the ticket resale side of the business," SeatGeek cofounder Russ D'Souza said in a statement. "With MLB, we get a chance to reimagine what the ticketing experience is like while bringing new fans to the ballpark."

In addition to Major League Baseball, SeatGeek also partners with major sports leagues like the NFL and NASCAR, and teams across North America and Europe like the Cowboys in the NFL, the Nets in the NBA, the Flyers in the NHL, Real Salt Lake in MLS and Manchester City in the English Premier League.