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Ticket broker: Someone paid $20,000 for a pair of World Series tickets

Grounds crew members paint the World Series logo behind home plate at Fenway Park, Sunday, Oct. 21, 2018, in Boston as they prepare for Game 1 of the baseball World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers scheduled for Tuesday.AP Photo/Elise Amendola

Want to watch the World Series in person? Here’s hoping you’ve either done a lot of saving up — or that you win the Mega Millions jackpot.

Tickets on the secondary market aren’t cheap. Fans have been shelling out between $700 and $1,750 per seat, on average, depending on the game in the series between the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers, according to data provided by resale companies.

“Demand has been very strong,” said Jim Holzman, founder and chief executive of Boston-based ticket broker AceTicket. “You have the Boston-L.A. rivalry carrying over from basketball into baseball and the East Coast-West Coast rivalry which adds to the excitement.”

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On ticket resale websites Monday, some premium seats were listed for sale well into the tens of thousands of dollars per seat.

It remains to be seen whether anyone will pay those sums, but Holzman said someone paid $10,000 per ticket for a pair of front row seats near the visitor’s on-deck circle for the first game of the series Tuesday night at Fenway Park — the most expensive tickets his company had sold as of late morning Monday.

StubHub spokesman Kevin Burke said the company sold a ticket to watch Game 4 from the Lexus Dugout Club at Dodger Stadium for $10,700.

“People are flying in from all over the world to see these games,” Holzman said, adding that L.A.’s involvement in the series raises the potential for wealthy Hollywood celebrities to buy seats.

“You never know who’s going to show up at these games, especially if it gets to game six or seven,” he said.

Tickets for those final two games, which would be played in Boston, are the most expensive. They’ve sold for between $1,000 and $1,750 per seat, on average, according to figures from StubHub, SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, and TicketCity.com. (If the series doesn’t go the full seven games, customers are refunded for any unplayed games.)

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Industry experts said to expect those prices to surge higher if it seems likely that the series will extend to a sixth or seventh game.

Tickets for the first two games, also in Boston, have been the least expensive, selling for between $700 and $1,000 per seat, on average.

The middle three games, which are set to be played in Los Angeles, are selling for between $800 and $1,450, on average, depending on the game.

Even the cheapest World Series tickets available as of Monday afternoon were in the $500 range, according to TicketIQ.

This will be Boston’s fourth World Series appearance since 2004, when the Sox made an unforgettable postseason run that included defeating their rival New York Yankees and then the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first championship in 86 years.

“ ’04 was the biggest of all” in terms of demand for tickets to World Series games involving the Sox, Holzman said.

But he claims the market this year is “bigger than ’07 and ’13.”

“The team this year is just such an exciting team and they seemed to be peaking at just the right time,” said Holzman.

There’s still a chance you can snag significantly cheaper, face-value tickets for the Fenway games directly from the Red Sox, if you’ve got lots of spare time and some luck on your side this week.

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Face value tickets are priced from $141 each for standing room to $486 apiece for field box seats.

While the vast majority of face value tickets for the home games are long gone, “a limited number of Day of Game tickets will be sold at Gate E Ticket Office starting 3 hours before each game. Fans can line up starting 5 hours before each game,” team spokesman Zineb Curran said in an e-mail.

He said face-value tickets also “periodically” become available when allotments set aside for visiting teams return them to the Red Sox. Those tickets get posted online, Curran said.

But they’ll sell in a flash. So, Curran advised, “check www.redsox.com or via the Ballpark App frequently all the way up until game time.”


Matt Rocheleau can be reached at matthew.rocheleau@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mrochele