Baseball fans: Capital One has great seats for 5,000 miles each

If you are a baseball fan, you have to check out the tickets for the rest of the season. A reader told me that Capital One is selling exclusive tickets for 5,000 miles per ticket, in many cases fantastic seats near the field. It is worth a look if you have Capital One miles and love baseball.

Capital One sells a great deal of cardholder exclusive tickets, but when they don't have them, they also sell general secondhand market tickets. I added an update after publication under the heading "How to find the good Capital One cardholder exclusive tickets".

• Capital One Entertainment is offering cardholder exclusive tickets to baseball games in April and May, with four seats available at 5,000 miles per seat (in excellent locations) for most of the games I checked
• Direct link to Capital One Entertainment

A reader sent this to me a few days ago and my initial thought was that baseball tickets are not always very expensive. The seats available through Capital One aren't cheap in most cases.

I was going to give tickets to a relative to see a Mets game, so I looked up Citi Field. I was drawn in by the view from the section where the seats are located. This is from RateYourSeats.com.

The first game I looked up was a $200 ticket in that section, and the screen shot above shows a different game with $101 tickets. Capital One is giving away seats for 5,000 miles per game. The first few games I tried at Yankee Stadium only had non-exclusive seats that were less expensive than other seats, and high service fees. I eventually found some games at Yankee Stadium with 5K-mile seats, which is one row in front of this one. Again, these are seats I wouldn't otherwise buy.

I talked it over with a family member who received the tickets and they found that Philadelphia has 5 rows of seats behind the visiting team's dugout, which seemed like even more fun.

I checked a bunch of other teams and they had great seats in many cities for the same 5,000 miles per ticket for up to 4 tickets per game for all of the games loaded through the end of May (the last date I saw available for Mets tickets was June 1st). Capital One has the same seats available for each game, and once the holder exclusive seats are gone, they may sell the publicly available options for less.

I bought a pair of the cardholder exclusive tickets and they were 10K miles for two tickets. The same seats for the same game with the same proximity to the field were going for north of $100 a ticket on the secondhand market, so paying 5K miles per ticket seemed like a solid value. You can do even better. There weren't any additional fees. The reader who pointed this out redeemed for tickets that were $300 a seat. The point is that this could be a lot of fun for a fan.

The Delta Club section is where the Mets play. The New York Mets website states that the seats in that section are theater-style seats and that there are a number of food outlets in that club section. You can get in-seat service at Shake Shack. There is a $10 monthly credit on the Gold card.

I don't know if Capital One will continue to offer tickets to games throughout the season or if this is just an early-season offering. I am not a huge baseball fan, but I enjoy cool experiences and tickets and I wouldn't be very likely to buy tickets so close to the field otherwise, so I would be tempted by this.

How to find the good Capital One Cardholder Exclusive tickets

You can find MLB tickets under the cardholder exclusives if you log in to Capital One Experiences.

There are two types of tickets being sold in the Capital One Entertainment portal, the Capital One exclusive tickets that this post is about are the same 4 seats for every game, and the Capital One regular tickets that this post is about are the same 4 seats for every game. If you only see one set of tickets available, and they are 5K miles per seat, they are the Capital One exclusive seats.

When you click through, you will see they are Capital One exclusives.

The tickets are 5K miles per ticket and have no additional fees. I paid 10K for two tickets to the Yankees game and the Mets game, and they were both sold out.

If you see tickets in a lot of different sections, they are powered by VividSeats and not cardholder exclusives. The tickets are not a good deal. You will only get 0.8c per point toward those tickets and there are a lot of add-on fees during the checkout process. A seat map with many different section choices indicates that they are not the exclusive seats.

Capital One labels the seats as though they cost $40.

You can't use money to buy seats if you have the exclusive tickets, and you can't buy them for less than $40. It's not the cardholder exclusive seats if you see different numbers of miles or fees.

If you pick a team that isn't in your area, you have to go to the city where you want to see them. It searched for tickets to the Chicago Cubs in New York. I had to go to Chicago to see the games.

I was happy to see that Capital One doesn't tack on any fees during the checkout process, it's just 5,000 miles per ticket.

Capital One offers interesting exclusives to its cardholders. I could see tickets to certain sold-out events or in great locations like these baseball tickets being an exciting perk. The tickets for the Final Four were cool. Offering something similar for other major events could be a great use of miles and a great perk of being a card.