In response to a nightmarish stretch of baseball the last two seasons and an attendance drop at Guaranteed Rate Field, the Chicago White Sox will reduce season ticket prices for 2025 by an average of 10%, the team announced Wednesday.
Invoices will go out to season ticket holders on Thursday with information on their packages, which will have differing amounts of reductions based on the location of their seats and the number of games in the package.
Brooks Boyer, the team’s vice president and chief marketing officer, said feedback from Sox fans led to the decision to cut back on ticket prices.
“We see what has happened,” he said. “Our season ticket base has decreased. We see what tickets go for on the secondary market with our season ticket holders. We want our season ticket holders to be able to make some money if they decide that’s how they want to fund their season tickets.
“We took all of it into consideration. It’s kind of easy to see with crowds and how the product on the field has struggled.”
The Sox, who had a major-league-worst 29-92 record entering Wednesday’s game against the New York Yankees, have the fourth-lowest average attendance at 18,231 per game, down from 21,405 last year.
They averaged 24,707 in 2022, a year that followed their division-winning season of ’21 when the original rebuild was seemingly on its way up. After a 101-loss season in ’23, the Sox were on pace to set a major-league record for losses in ’24, and last week fired manager Pedro Grifol, replacing him with interim manager Grady Sizemore. The search for a new manager from outside the organization is already underway, general manager Chris Getz said last week.
The first 2025 season ticket payment is due Sept. 30. Boyer said the team is sending invoices out in mid-August because it prefers to know what its season ticket base will be going into the offseason so Getz “can make some decisions” over the winter.
That doesn’t mean Getz is going to spend money or reduce payroll, though early speculation is on the latter. The Sox are one of two teams that have yet to hand out a contract of at least $100 million, and the second rebuild since 2017 has a long way to go before Getz can think of spending on even B-level free agents.
Boyer also said Rate, the company that owns the naming rights to the ballpark, has the option of changing the name from Guaranteed Rate Field, its former name. The ballpark, for instance, could be called Rate Field in 2025.
Boyer confirmed that first-year broadcaster John Schriffen, who has a multi-year contract, will return in ’25 with the Chicago Sports Network, the new broadcast outlet replacing NBC Sports Chicago for the Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks. He added they “fully expect” to re-sign analyst Steve Stone, whose contract is up after the season. Stone has not given any indication of whether he will return, though it will be his choice.
Boyer said the Sox were “looking at a lot of different ways to make our coverage of the White Sox better than it is now.” He had no update on the popular postgame show featuring Chuck Garfien and Ozzie Guillen, who have been highly critical of the team’s play and of Grifol’s management.
“If you listen to the baseball broadcast, they’re really good,” he said. “They are a quality broadcast. Steve Stone is one of the very best in the business, and I think John does a really good job of bringing Steve in and out and letting him be what he is, which is amazing.”
