It will cost you more to watch pro baseball in Utah this season.
The Salt Lake Bees have left the confines of Smith’s Ballpark in Salt Lake City for the new Daybreak Field at America First Square, about a 20-mile drive from the old park that had hosted Salt Lake baseball for nearly a century.
And as the team prepares to open its first season in its new home, ticket prices have gone up. The team has yet to begin single-game sales, but has put prices for season tickets and suites on its website — generally, single-game tickets are more expensive than their season-ticket counterparts. Bees management, though, says that the better experience justifies the higher cost.
“What we’re offering is so different than things that we’ve done in the past,” Bees general manager Ty Wardle said. “We have to make it make sense with building a building like we are — with the Miller family contributing. It’s going to be a privately funded building, and we’re not asking for community or statewide support."
Season tickets
Here’s the Bees' season ticket price chart for the upcoming 2025 season:
(Salt Lake Bees) A pricing chart for the new seating at Daybreak Field.
Season tickets for the club start at $17 per game for seats out in the left outfield for all 75 games, and go all the way up to $52 per game for seats along the two dugouts near first and third base in quarter-season packages.
It’s not really possible to do an apples-to-apples comparison between these prices and those at Smith’s Ballpark because, naturally, the different stadiums have different ticket sections. But any way you slice it, ticket prices will be significantly higher: season tickets cost $9 to $18 per game for the team in 2023. That means that, for example, tickets near the dugouts will cost three to four times more than they did in Salt Lake City.
Team management, though, is pleased with how sales have gone so far. “When it starts to warm up, or people start to think about spring, that’s when it will probably get some more attention,” Wardle says. “But it’s gone really, really well.”
Premium seating
Daybreak Field is significantly smaller than Smith’s Ballpark. It has a capacity of only 8,000 fans, while the old park had a capacity of about double that (15,400). The Bees averaged 6,200 fans last year at that stadium, though, so perhaps the smaller park is a better fit.
And Daybreak Field will be very different when compared to Smith’s Ballpark in its approach to seating in general: multiple sections behind home plate are dedicated to premium seating only, which will include food and non-alcoholic drinks. In all, premium seating makes up one-sixth of seats at the new ballpark, whereas it contributed to just 3% of Smith’s Ballpark’s capacity.
You’ll notice that the seats closest to the action aren’t available for sale on a per-ticket basis; instead, those are field-level suites that must be reserved in their entirety.
(Salt Lake Bees) Daybreak Field suite layout.
The higher-up Terrace Club and Diamond Club seats are sold on a per-seat basis. Those tickets for those go from $75 to $102 per game.
(Salt Lake Bees) Bees premium seating prices for 2025 at Daybreak Field.
The dollars get really high, though, when talking about renting out one of the suites. There are 10 “Field Suites” and four “Founders Suites” that each have room for 24 patrons, they also come with six parking passes. Those start at $55,000 to rent out for a quarter-season, or $2,894 per game — roughly $120 per ticket. A full 75-game rental of one of these suites goes up to $188,000, or $2,500 per game.
That’s four to six times higher than what a suite cost to rent at Bees games previously: $471 per game for a whole-season package, or $604 for a quarter-season. (Those suites, it must be noted, allowed for up to 20 people to attend, not 24.)
What the Bees say
The Bees defended these higher prices, noting they plan to have cheaper options for fans and families who want to attend a game or two: the outfield berm. They note, for example, that they plan to sell their those spots on the grass for $10, similar to or even sometimes less expensive than those spots went for in 2024. (The outfield berm at Daybreak Field, though, will be much smaller than that at Smith’s Ballpark, which stretched around the whole field. Daybreak Field’s general-admission berm is only in right field, and will fit only 1,000 people.)
They also say parking prices will be cheaper in Daybreak, and that parking will be more abundant. They say they’ll have 1,400 parking spaces available for Bees games, for which they say they will charge $10 per car. At Smith’s, they said there were only 400 parking spaces, for which pricing ranged from $15 to $25 per car.
They say that, as a result of these changes, families purchasing those general admission tickets at Daybreak will find their costs equal to what they saw in Salt Lake City. They also say there will be some “family-friendly” alcohol-free sections at Daybreak Park — but the team has yet to decide which sections those will be.
Finally, the team feels that the experience for Bees baseball fans will be better both in and out of the stadium than it was at the old ballpark.
“The difference in experience that our customers will feel is that we’re creating an entertainment district, so that people will want to show up a few hours before the game to come and enjoy local food and beverage partners, shop retail, maybe go to our new cinema entertainment center and just enjoy the experience of being in the ballpark district out there,” Wardle said.
Wardle cited the stage at center field, which will be used for Daybreak community events and small concerts. It will be able to host a crowd of up to three to four thousand people, he said.
“Think farmers markets, think community engagement events, think lantern festivals. Think movie nights on the lawn, using our new LED scoreboard,” Wardle imagined.
“We’ve taken pride in not being the most expensive entertainment option in Salt Lake, and we are far from that,” Wardle said. “We have some good data behind that, we want to continue to keep that narrative and story that we’re family friendly, wallet friendly.”
“In general, when you build a new building like we’re doing, with the cost of construction, we have to be able to capture premium opportunities,” Wardle said. “But at the same time ... we wanted to make sure our ticket packages scale, from all different demographics to premium experiences for anyone who wants to pay for those.”
The team’s first game at the new Daybreak Field comes April 8, against the Reno Aces.
