Major League Baseball will release commemorative NFT tickets for games played throughout the 2022 season. The NFT tickets cannot be used for admission to a game, but instead will serve as a digital memento for baseball fans attending games in a post-paper ticket stub world. The NFT ticket release is part of a collaboration between MLB and Candy Digital.
It’s also part of a growing trend in sports. The NFL released commemorative NFT Super Bowl tickets this year. The Super Bowl NFT tickets included the fans’ section, row and seat number.
“As tickets have become more and more a digital product opposed to a physical product that fans have, fans have lost that ability to collect a ticket stub as a memory of the game they attended or a memorable event that happened in a game,” MLB EVP of business development Kenny Gersh said Tuesday at the league’s midtown Manhattan headquarters. “We’re now offering a series of NFTs to represent those tickets.”
NFT Sale Restricted to Fans Purchasing Game Tickets
The sales of MLB’s Standard Game Ticket NFTs on Candy Digital will be limited to fans who purchased tickets to attend the game associated with that NFT. Gersh expects the commemorative NFTs will be available for under $10 and will include video of a memorable play from that ticket’s game. The NFL and Ticketmaster launched commemorative NFT tickets to selected regular season and post-season games last season, but those NFTs were only of static images.
MLB’s NFT tickets will also feature that ticket’s seat number and may possibly mention a club sponsor. The National Leagues’ New York Mets and San Francisco Giants are among 10 Major League Baseball clubs who will additionally gift season-ticket NFTs to their season-ticket holders. The complimentary NFTs will also update throughout the season with the team’s record and the scores from each game.
Finally, a third MLB NFT ticket offering this season will come in the form of game day giveaways. All 30 clubs will be able to offer their fans commemorative NFTs to two games this season that Gersh compared to “the old bobblehead night.” Only fans that are in attendance at the ballpark will be eligible to receive that game’s themed NFT.
MLB also Releasing Player NFTs
In addition to the commemorative ticket NFTs, Major League Baseball also partnered with Candy Digital to release NFTs of 720 players . These 2022 MLB ICON Leadoff Series NFTs feature dynamic player stats, with the statistics for each player NFT automatically updating each day.
MLB Taking a Hard-Look at Fan Tokens, Is Chiliz On-Deck?
Major League Baseball is looking at other digital assets besides NFTs. In addition to Candy Digital’s digital trading cards and commemorative ticket NFTs, Gersh also said that MLB is evaluating fan tokens and that the space has “a lot of upside and potential.” Teams in European soccer, the NBA, NHL and NFL have partnered with sports blockchain provider Chiliz, the Malta-based developer of Socios.com, the creators of fan tokens.
Fan tokens are crypto assets that give sports fans that own them access to exclusive team rewards, polls and other experiences. Recently, Turkish Super League football club Gaziantep FK partnered with Chiliz to launch their club fan token.
“We are taking a hard-look at the fan token area, our marketing team is very focused on it as it relates to fan loyalty, we have a whole task force on it internally,” Gersh said. “I think you’ll see more of that coming this year.”
Image: Pixabay
Disclaimer: Although the material contained in this website was prepared based on information from public and private sources that chiliznews.com believes to be reliable, no representation, warranty or undertaking, stated or implied, is given as to the accuracy of the information contained herein, and chiliznews.com expressly disclaims any liability for the accuracy and completeness of the information contained in this website.
