Brewers Admit a Timeless Ticket Mistake and Let Holders Keep Both Seats

The Milwaukee Brewers are about to play a World Series at home for the first time since 1982, and some of the fans who backed the club earliest spent the week arguing with it over where they would sit. In 2015 the Brewers sold 1,000 Timeless Tickets at $1,000 each, each one redeemable for any game the holder chose. Holders who saved theirs for this week were offered the terrace level or standing room only, and two of them said no in public. On Tuesday the club answered, and its answer was an admission: it got the redemptions wrong, and the holders will keep their World Series seats and their tickets.

Update, Tuesday October 20: Brewers president of business operations Rick Schlesinger released a statement admitting the club erred in its internal communications and did not live up to the spirit of the programme. Holders who applied before the deadline keep their World Series seats and keep their Timeless Ticket for a future season. The sections below have been updated with the statement and what it leaves open.

What exactly did the Timeless Ticket promise?

One seat at any future Brewers home game, with no expiry date. FanSided’s history of the promotion describes a solid brass ticket engraved with the buyer’s name, launched in January 2015 when Milwaukee were coming off an 82-80 season and a third straight year without October baseball. The club’s own promotional wording, still live, says that whether it is this season, the year 2050 or the seventh game of the World Series, all are valid games to redeem a Timeless Ticket. Redemption also allows the holder to buy up to three additional tickets at face value. The argument is not about getting in. It is about one line on the information card that came with each ticket, quoted by TMJ4: the ticket “may be redeemed for the best available seat locations, subject to ticket availability at the time of redemption.”

What were holders actually offered for the World Series?

The fourth deck. Kevin and Kyle Deaton, brothers from Kenosha who paid $1,000 each in 2015, told TMJ4 they were stunned to find their options were terrace level seats or standing room only. “When you promise somebody the best seat available, and you give them pretty much the worst seats that you have in the whole stadium, I would say, no. They’re not honoring it,” Kyle Deaton said. He described calling the ticket office: “This has to be a mistake. It’s terrace level; that’s level four. That’s not the best available seat. And she said, yeah, I’m not going to argue that there’s better seats available. This is what’s being allocated to the Timeless Ticket holders.” Kevin Deaton said he had not expected the front row, but had expected something in the first ten rows. Both brothers refused the allocation and plan to watch from home. Sports Illustrated confirmed the shape of the offer independently: one upper deck seat per ticket, with the option to buy three more tickets at $1,000 each.

Why does the 2018 comparison make this worse for the club?

Because holders have a precedent, and it is a good one. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel spoke to Danny Fochesato, who went through the redemption process in 2018 and again in 2025. In 2018, had Milwaukee reached the World Series, he would have had four seats in Section 119, right behind home plate, and the three additional tickets were priced at $360 each. This year his allocation was the 400 level terrace or standing room, additional tickets ran from $725 for standing room to $1,000 for a terrace box, and he said better seats became available to the general public after holders had been allocated theirs. “That right there tells me that what they were offering us before the public sale wasn’t ‘best available,’” he told the paper. Fochesato also said he has connected with other holders online who share the frustration, and that some have decided not to redeem at all.

What did the Brewers announce on Tuesday?

An admission, and a refund paid in the programme’s own currency. In a statement reported by TMJ4 and FOX6, president of business operations Rick Schlesinger said several hundred holders had indicated before the deadline that they intended to redeem their ticket for a World Series game. The club, he said, erred in its internal communications on the logistics of fulfilling those requests. Every holder was given a seat, but some were unhappy with the locations, and the club accepts that, even with the limits on available seats, it did not live up to the spirit of the programme. The resolution is that holders who applied before the deadline will be contacted by the club: they keep the World Series seats they were given for this year, and they keep their Timeless Ticket, redeemable for another game in any future season. Schlesinger said the club regrets its mistake. Two limits of the offer are worth stating plainly. Nothing in the statement moves anyone’s seat for this World Series; the terrace allocation stands, and the compensation is the second redemption. And the statement, as reported, speaks to holders who applied and accepted seats. It does not say what happens to a holder who refused the allocation outright, in a series where Junior Caminero’s first postseason homer sent Tampa Bay to meet Milwaukee.

What is the seat actually worth, then?

Far more than $1,000, which was always the awkward part of the argument. Sports Illustrated, citing Front Office Sports, put the cheapest secondary market ticket for Game 1 at $2,809, a higher get-in price than Super Bowl LX, while 1982 World Series tickets at County Stadium had a face value of $18. A terrace seat at face value is a bargain most fans in Milwaukee would take at once, and it now comes with the original ticket handed back as well. The holders’ case was never about value. It was about what best available meant to the 1,000 people who handed over $1,000 in 2015, when a World Series in Milwaukee was a hypothetical, and kept the ticket in a drawer through the near misses. The full context of how rare this stage is for both clubs sits in most World Series wins by a team, where neither Milwaukee nor Tampa Bay appears at all.

What happens next?

Game 1 is Friday at American Family Field, against a Rays team carried there by Freddy Peralta, the pitcher Milwaukee traded away in January. The club will contact the holders who applied before the deadline, and Friday will show how many of them are in the building. The open question is the refusers. The Deaton brothers said they would watch from home unless the club came back with a better offer; Tuesday’s statement is a better offer of one kind, a second game rather than a better seat, and nothing published yet records whether they take it, or whether a holder who said no still has a World Series seat to keep. Milwaukee’s wait for this week lasted 44 years, the kind of span catalogued in the longest championship droughts in North American sports. The fans who pre-paid for it in 2015 will now watch its end from the top deck, with their brass ticket still in hand for another year. One person with a stake in the outcome needs no ticket at all: Jake Woodford pitched for both clubs this season and is in line for a ring either way.