A followup on the MLB Ballpark app’s issues with Ticketmaster

Last week, I posted here about some issues I was having accessing tickets for some Cubs vs. Braves games in Atlanta in September through the MLB Ballpark app. The tickets weren’t accessible at all, and I kept getting weird error messages when trying to load them.

I’m happy to report that I can now see these tickets via the MLB Ballpark app, and this is thanks to the folks at the @MLBFanSupport Twitter account, who patiently spent a lot of time back-and-forth with me trying to diagnose and fix this issue. Kudos to them.

The issue appears to have been localized to certain Samsung Galaxy phones and only for Ticketmaster-based tickets — my Cubs season tickets had no problems. The Cubs use Tickets.com for ticket distribution. I have a Galaxy S22+. A friend of mine who has a Galaxy S21 had similar issues accessing his Diamondbacks tickets, also a Ticketmaster-based team.

I will say this, however, about Ticketmaster and its interface with the MLB Ballpark app. There had been absolutely no issues with this sort of thing before this year. Each year since MLB teams went all-mobile — essentially, since the pandemic ended — I had bought tickets to see the Cubs play the White Sox on the South Side. The Sox use Ticketmaster. There were no issues with those tickets.

This year, I did the same, in addition to those Braves tickets, and had the same issue. It appears that Ticketmaster has forced MLB to use its own interface in the Ballpark app for this year, which makes you to log in each and every time you try to view Ticketmaster-based tickets. It’s still an extremely clunky interface, even on iPhones, where MLB Ballpark app users didn’t have the same issues I did. Why they just couldn’t stick with what they had is beyond me. Further, as pointed out by one of the commenters in the previous article, it appears MLB and Ticketmaster released this “update” into the wild without fully testing it and counted on users to report problems.

Fortunately, this problem is solved. Again, many thanks to the folks at the MLB Fan Support Twitter account — very friendly and helpful.

I had also tagged the @TMFanSupport Twitter account, Ticketmaster’s online support, in my tweet accompanying the original article. You will likely not be surprised to learn that I never heard from them.

Do better, Ticketmaster.