For those of you (like me) who have been spoiled by great, affordable single game tickets on StubHub, all of that is about to change . . . the Angels recently announced that they are partnering with Ticketmaster's TicketExchange service as their official fan-to-fan ticket marketplace. This is an absolute slap in the face to all of the fans who have been able to go to more games because of the affordability of StubHub tickets. In theory, TicketExchange will offer the exact same opportunity to get cheap tickets as StubHub, but in practice, it does nothing of the sort.

For a while now, the NHL (and the NBA/NFL) have been partnered with TicketExchange and it has been much more expensive (even when you factor in the smaller seating capacity of NHL arenas) than purchasing MLB/Angels tickets on StubHub. Why? Because StubHub is a better known quantity and people generally list their tickets there first even if it is not the "official" fan-to-fan marketplace for tickets. This splits the resell tickets among two sites and generally speaking, the more expensive ones are on TicketExchange while the cheaper ones are on StubHub.

The problem is that because StubHub will no longer be the official marketplace, they will no longer have the ability to have the seller just type in the barcode and have the buyer print out the tickets rather cheaply . . . this makes it so the buyer (in most cases) has to pay to have the physical tickets shipped to them, which of course, jacks up the price of the tickets on StubHub. Because the buyer has to pay this new premium and not the seller, people will continue to list their tickets on StubHub thus upping the price on everyone.

What about TicketMaster's TicketExchange? Well, like I said before, TicketExchange isn't as known a quantity and sellers will continue to list their tickets on StubHub because more people will check that site first and will continue to have a larger number of tickets available—along with a MUCH more fan friendly site.

LINK TO ANGELS OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE

Long story short, I am very disappointed in the Angels for partnering with TicketMaster and opting out of Major League Baseball's deal with StubHub. Rant. Over.