Revisiting MLB Opening Day
Pennant races are heating up for MLB but I want to step back to opening day for the 2026 season for a minute. For the last several years I’ve made last-minute purchases for tickets to the opening day game for the Brewers. Not so this year.
When I went to search for tickets, I discovered that the Brewers, like a lot of MLB teams as far as I can tell, made a fundamental change to their ticketing platform. The older system was never perfect but in the absence of good accessibility had at least one feature that I found helpful in trying to get tickets. There was an option to have the ticketing system choose the best available seats at the price you wanted to pay. That is now gone.
The accessibility of the new system was lacking in many ways beyond this on opening day. MLB has corrected some of these but in my opinion, the system is still fundamentally flawed for being able to make intelligent choices about ticket purchases.
Today, when you get to the actual ticket purchasing experience, MLB presents you with a list of sections in a baseball stadium. For American Family Field, this is strictly a list of numbers starting at 101 and going up to something around 442. No context about where in the stadium each section is or anything else that would help you to make an informed purchase.
Picking a section gives you a second list of seats in that section which indicate the section, row and seat. This is marginally better.
The Potential
MLB’s current system is much like a minor league ball player trying to make it to the show. There are flashes of brilliance but then so many shortcomings that you have to wonder if the major leagues are ever a possibility.
For example, with those sections I mentioned, there is no way to move more than one section at a time with the keyboard. Fine if you do not want to allow data entry but basic usability would allow for support of scrolling with keys such as page up and page down or home and end.
Also, when you first get into the ticketing platform, you get the all-too-common message about some accessibility system being in place because you are greeted with this message:
Please note: This website includes an accessibility system. Press Control-F11 to adjust the website to people with visual disabilities who are using a screen reader; Press Control-F10 to open an accessibility menu.
Exactly how this improves the rest of the experience is not something I’ve been able to determine so far. What I can tell you is what it does not do. It does not tell me where any of those sections are. It does not make page down work in that list of sections. It does not turn 101 through 442 into anything I can reason about. An overlay announces that accessibility has been considered, which is a different thing from the experience being usable, and the two get confused far too often. Handing me a keyboard shortcut for an accessibility menu and handing me a list that runs from 101 to 442 with no context are the same move: the appearance of information in place of the information.
MLB Ticketing Experience
An example of the ticketing experience MLB uses can be found by starting at www.brewers.com/tickets and then choosing Single Game Tickets.
A Sample Solution
Using a combination of various AI prompts to review visual seating charts, search stadium information and more, I put together an example of the sort of solution I’d like to see MLB and other stadiums and ticket sellers make available. You can find my solution at https://theideaplace.net/projects/mlb/.
The Basic Solution
The pitch is simple. A seating chart answers one question at a glance: where would I actually be sitting? My guide answers that same question in words.
Pick a ballpark and you get every section in it. American Family Field has 151. For each one you get the level it sits on, the ticket zone it belongs to, how many sections it is from home plate and in which direction, how many rows deep it is, which row you enter at, and which end of the row seat 1 is on. Section 116 stops being a number in a list and becomes something you can reason about: Field Level, Field Infield Box, one section from home plate toward first base, rows 1 through 21, entered at row 21 from the top, netting in front, very sunny early in a day game and shaded by roughly two in the afternoon in July.
That last item, the seat numbering, is the piece I most wanted and the piece nobody publishes plainly. Seat numbers run in a direction, and that direction reverses at home plate. At American Family Field, section 116 on the first-base side has seat 1 at the end of the row closest to home plate. Section 121 on the third-base side is the mirror image, so seat 1 there is the end farthest from the plate. Same ballpark, same tier, opposite answer. If you care whether you are on the aisle or buried in the middle, or whether you are drifting toward the infield or away from it, that is the difference between choosing a seat and guessing at one.
Rows are the other thing a chart shows and a list does not. Terrace Box 420, directly behind home plate, has rows 1 through 3, then row 5, then rows 8 through 25. Rows 4, 6 and 7 do not exist. That gap is where a wheelchair platform sits. There is no way to work that out from “Section 420, Row 8” on a ticketing page, and it matters quite a lot if row 5 is the row you were told to look for.
The page is built to be read rather than looked at. Every section is its own heading, so you move through the ballpark the way you move through any well-structured page. A search box takes a section number, a zone name or a landmark, so typing dugout or bullpen narrows the list to the sections near one. You can filter by level. There is a single table of every section for scanning, and the underlying data downloads as a CSV if you would rather sort and filter it in a spreadsheet.
One rule I set from the start is that where a source does not state something, the guide has to say so rather than quietly filling the gap. At Sutter Health Park, no source I could find publishes which side seat 1 is on, so that guide says exactly that instead of inventing an answer. Every section also carries a confidence rating, and each ballpark has a list of the questions I could not settle. A guide that admits what it does not know is more useful than one that reads smoothly and is wrong in places you cannot identify.
There are now thirty ballparks in the guide, 4,723 sections in total, covering all six divisions. None of this is technically hard. It is headings, tables with real column and row headers, and plain text. That is rather the point. The information already exists somewhere in every one of these ticketing systems. What is missing is the decision to present it in a form you can actually read.
A Note on Data
As I said, this content was all generated by AI. Obviously I’m not able to see the seating maps to validate this. I have tried to review the process I used and some of the information but am providing this guide as an example. Separate the concept from the data.
I’d also rather be told about an error than not. If you know a ballpark well and something in one of these guides is wrong, I want to hear about it. You can file an issue at https://github.com/kellylford/TheWorkBench/issues and I will take a look. But the argument I’m making here does not depend on my data being perfect. It depends on the fact that MLB and the ticket sellers have the real data, know it is correct, and still hand me a list of numbers from 101 to 442.
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