Project: Season Tix Manager

Note: for the 2024 San Diego Padres season, I migrated my latest version of the season ticket manager to a project. Use that going forward. This blog post refers to the 2023 edition and will remain available for reference.

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As a kid, I grew up going to Padres games at Jack Murphy Stadium in Mission Valley. I lived and breathed baseball for most of my life until college, but my home town team, the San Diego Padres, had never really amounted to much by then. After the team sold in 2012¹, a few years went by without much success; before the shortened COVID season, their most recent finish over .500 was during Obama’s first term (2010). 😬

But that was finally starting to change. After a glimmer of hope in the shortened 2020 season, followed by a disappointing collapse in 2021², the Padres have sparked something special that I almost forgot had ever existed. They are spending to sign and retain top talent, winning games, and making postseason runs. All the while baseball has become hugely more data-driven (Baseball Savant is a real-life broadcast nugget generator a la Harry Doyle). This was the perfect time for me to re-ignite my fandom that had all but fizzled.

The Duke leads the league in saves, strikeouts per inning and hit batsmen. This guy threw at his own kid in a father-son game.

– Harry Doyle, Indians announcer played by Bob Uecker in Major League (1989)

A good problem to have

In the summer of 2021, fighting the sting of the Padres collapse, I decided to not only give the Padres organization another chance, but I wanted to get closer to the action. I would purchase a mini-season ticket plan of 20 games for the 2022 season.

Twenty games is also known as a quarter season, since it’s roughly one quarter of the total home games (81) in a regular season. While this may seem like very few games, it adds up quickly, both in cost, and in the planning of your personal life around many weeknight games (this is all prior to the rule changes that will likely shorten games in 2023). So I enlisted the help of a couple close family members who showed interest in taking at least some of the games off my plate. This still presented a problem of information sharing & coordination; how would we allocate games fairly but also give all parties transparency into scheduling to easily make modifications throughout the season?

While my family jokes that I should get a full back tattoo of a spreadsheet, the impetus behind the joke is sincere– since I love data, naturally I love organizing data into spreadsheets to present information in more useful ways… Smart money was on spreadsheets for this one.

The Solution

The 2023 regular season schedule was announced in August, so I could begin tabulating the schedule into a more usable format. This would help evaluate plans for which weekdays, or day vs night games and other helpful comparisons we desired most.

Plan	Days of Week	Day Games	Night Games	TBD3	Total
Gold A	Mon/Weds/Fri/Sun	21	18	1	40
Gold B	Mon/Tues/Thur/Sat	4	35	1	40
Blue W	Sun/Weds	16	3	1	20
Blue X	Mon/Weds/Fri	5	15	0	20
Blue Y	Tues/Sat	2	17	1	20
Blue Z	Mon/Thur/Sat	2	18	0	20

However, one key piece of information was still not published; that being game tiers. Some games are rated more highly, typically due to the opposing matchup, or the game being a nationally televised broadcast. This is very important information when splitting up season tickets, because not all games are equal. And, giveaways were not yet announced either, but generally these don’t correlate to higher tiered games. In fact, there may be a negative correlation; the less popular games still turn out a crowd due to bobbleheads or other instant classics like the Padres Hawaiian shirt.

After getting the entire season of home games entered into the sheet, with the correct opponent, date, time and season plan association, I could begin the work of tailoring the Google Sheet to more of a season ticket manager. This would include features like setting your availability, preferred number of games, and calendar export-ability.

The next task would be to loop in my co-owners with whom I’m sharing the season ticket package. They would enter their desired number of games and availability for the games in our package. Then, we can all meet to divvy up games fairly relative to each member’s availability & desired games.

Once we assign games, the last feature I hoped to deliver was a way to automate calendar invites so none of us needed to check the Google Sheet in order to confirm if we were attending a game on a given night. To achieve this, I found an add-on called Sheets2GCal which could connect items in a sheet to a Google Calendar.

So as the season moves along, we may trade in or sell some tickets, or need to switch games with other members. The Sheets2GCal add-on affords me one-click publishing any changes from the Google sheet to the shared calendar. Note: the personal license permits 5,000 events to be synched, which should last me until the Padres first championship.

Closing Thoughts & Scope Creep

While my initial motivation for this project was undeniably selfish (make season tickets more accessible to me), the outcome has proven valuable to any Padres season ticket holder. I would even bet there’s a good market for this solution across all professional sports.

Sharing season tickets with friends and fans alike while giving ticket holders more tooling for managing their investment is a win for all parties involved. Of course, there’s always a chance the team misses expectations and the value of tickets plumet, both in terms of my free time & resale value. But even as prices went up for 2023⁴, the Padres are likely selling more season tickets, so there is a virtuous cycle.

We have an unprecedented demand for tickets right now. Hopefully we finish the season strong, have a deep run in the playoffs and that’ll be helpful to also justify the increases ultimately, but it really comes back to what we’ve done with payroll and the need to be able to support that.

– Erik Greupner, Padres CEO in August 2022

Another fun feature to consider for the future would be to automate giveaway posts to Twitter or the Padres Subreddit, in case of any last minute change of plans where we can’t use the tickets. Alas, maybe next season I’ll get around to testing this.

If you want to utilize or build on this, open the Google Sheet and make a copy for yourself.

Go Padres!!