What It Costs to Be a Fan

You don’t need to be rich to love baseball. That’s the whole pitch, right? It’s the people’s sport. Hot dogs, bleacher seats, a warm afternoon at the ballpark with whoever matters to you. For a lot of families in California, buying a cheap pair of tickets to a Giants game is the splurge that gets circled on the calendar weeks ahead of time.

Juan Flores is one of those people. A Los Angeles resident, he went online to the Giants’ official website in March 2024 looking for tickets to a Padres-Giants game in April. He found them. Two tickets. Ten dollars each. Twenty bucks total. That’s a number that works. That’s a number you can say yes to without checking your bank account twice.

So he went through the process. He picked the game. He browsed the seating map. He found two seats in his price range. He signed into his MLB account. He scrolled through prompts asking whether he wanted to add parking, make a donation to the Giants’ cause of choice, choose his delivery method, enter his payment details, and agree to Terms and Conditions that, if you printed them out, would cover 15 full pages of paper. All of this happened inside a timed checkout window, a countdown clock ticking in the corner of the screen, the digital equivalent of a store clerk tapping their watch at you.

And then, only then, at the very bottom of that final page, after all of that: the real price. Not $20.00. $29.00. A $5.50 “Convenience” fee and a $3.50 “Order” processing fee had been added, unexplained, without any description of what service they were paying for or how those numbers were calculated. The price had gone up 45% from what was shown when he chose his seats.

The word “convenience” deserves a moment here. The Giants charged Juan Flores $5.50 for the convenience of buying tickets on the website they built and control, for a game they are hosting, in a stadium they operate. The convenience in question was theirs. They got to collect his money online without staffing a box office. He got a bill for it.

There is a specific kind of anger that comes from being tricked by something you trusted. Juan Flores didn’t walk into a shady third-party reseller site. He went to the official MLB website for the San Francisco Giants. He did everything right. He budgeted. He comparison-shopped. He made a decision. And then the price changed on him at the last minute, inside a ticking clock, after he had already put in the time, made the mental commitment, and was staring at a payment form. The complaint describes this as psychological commitment, and that’s the clinical term, but the human term is: he was already there. He was already at the game in his head. Backing out means starting the whole process over, losing the seats you picked, maybe losing the date entirely. The Giants knew this. The research cited in the complaint proves they knew this. Companies that use drip pricing know exactly what they’re doing to your decision-making.

The complaint estimates hundreds of thousands of people went through this same experience. Every one of them faced the same countdown clock, the same buried fees, the same gap between the price that hooked them and the price they actually paid. These are not wealthy people absorbing a rounding error. As former President Biden put it in a quote cited directly in this lawsuit: “junk fees may not matter to the very wealthy, but they matter to most other folks in homes like the one I grew up in.” A $9 fee on a $20 transaction is not a small surcharge. It is a 45% markup hidden until the moment you are least likely to walk away.

The Giants stopped hiding these fees around July 2024. They have not paid any of it back.

Straight From the Complaint: What They Did and What the Law Says About It

The following are direct quotes from Case No. 3:26-cv-00849, Document 1, filed January 26, 2026. Every word is from the actual court filing.

“For years, San Francisco Baseball Associates LLC (the ‘Giants’) systemically cheated fans out of millions of dollars by falsely advertising their ticket prices for baseball games.”

• This is the opening sentence of the complaint. It uses the word “systemically,” which signals that the attorneys are arguing this was a deliberate, ongoing business practice, not a website error or a one-time glitch.
• “Cheated” and “falsely advertising” are the two operative claims that feed into violations of the CLRA, UCL, and FAL. The court will need to evaluate whether those words hold up, but they set the framing for every cause of action that follows.

“Rather than disclosing the full cost of purchasing tickets upfront, the Giants tacked on last-minute ‘Service’ fees, ‘Convenience’ fees, ‘Handling and Convenience’ fees, and ‘Order’ processing fees that increased the cost of the purchase, exceeding the price initially advertised to the consumer, often by more than $50 per transaction.”

• This establishes scale. The complaint documents fees exceeding $50 per transaction in some cases, well beyond the $9 in the lead plaintiff’s own transaction. This matters for the class action’s scope: the damages vary by transaction size.
• The phrase “often by more than $50” is significant because it demolishes any defense that the fees were trivial or de minimis. Fifty dollars is not a rounding error on a ticket purchase.

“Only once consumers finally reached the bottom of the page did the Giants disclose the true total price, in a ‘Total Amount Due’ section that separately listed out the subtotal, Junk Fees, and total amount due for the transaction.”

• This documents the specific checkout architecture. The true price was structurally buried, requiring the buyer to scroll past parking upsells, donation prompts, delivery selection, payment entry, and a 15-page terms agreement before reaching the actual cost.
• Under California’s Honest Pricing Act and the FTC’s own definition of Junk Fees, disclosure “only at a later stage in the consumer’s purchasing process” qualifies as a hidden fee, which is the legal threshold the complaint is invoking.

“To make matters worse and to add pressure to further interfere with user decision-making, in the upper right corner of the page, the Giants included a countdown clock. While the countdown clock runs, consumers (1) must review all of the information on the checkout screen regarding fees and add-on items, such as parking, ticket delivery, and donations, (2) must add their payment information (3) are expected to read and agree to the Giants’ ‘Terms & Conditions,’ which, if printed on standard 8.5"x11" paper would total 15 pages, and (4) must notice and understand the increase in the cost of their tickets.”

• The countdown clock is described as a deliberate pressure mechanism, not a neutral feature. The complaint argues it was engineered to interfere with the consumer’s ability to evaluate the fee disclosure and make an informed decision.
• The 15-page Terms & Conditions detail is critical: a consumer cannot realistically read, understand, and make a deliberate choice about fees while simultaneously racing a clock, selecting delivery methods, and entering credit card numbers. The design made informed decision-making structurally impossible.
• This passage also establishes that the fee disclosure was present but functionally inaccessible, which matters under the legal standard. The complaint argues that mere technical presence of a disclosure at the bottom of an overwhelming, timed screen does not constitute adequate or honest disclosure under California law.

“The act is intended to specifically prohibit drip pricing, which . . . like other forms of bait and switch advertising, is prohibited by existing statutes, including the Unfair Competition Law . . . and the False Advertising Law.” [California Civil Code § 1(a)-(b), quoted in complaint]

• This quote is from the California Honest Pricing Act itself. The Legislature explicitly stated on the record that this practice was already illegal before S.B. 478 passed. This eliminates any argument from the Giants that they were operating in a legal gray area before July 1, 2024.
• The retroactive clarity matters enormously for the class period. The Giants stopped the practice around July 2024, but the complaint covers transactions before that date, going back to a period when the Giants could theoretically argue the law was unclear. The Legislature’s own language forecloses that defense.

“Although on or about July 2024 the Giants stopped charging undisclosed Junk Fees, they have not refunded fans the millions of dollars in Junk Fees that those fans have been charged.”

• This is the central injustice the lawsuit exists to correct. Stopping the practice earns no credit if the money extracted through the practice is never returned. The Giants quietly fixed their website and kept the cash.
• The phrase “millions of dollars” is consistent with the complaint’s invocation of the Class Action Fairness Act threshold, which requires an amount in controversy exceeding $5 million. The complaint is explicit that this threshold is met.

Who Gets Hurt and How

Public Health: The Cognitive Tax on Working People

Drip pricing does not just cost money. It costs mental bandwidth. Research cited in the complaint documents a specific, measurable harm to consumers’ ability to make rational decisions.

• Consumers exposed to drip pricing are significantly more likely to select an option with a lower base price and end up paying more overall than if they had chosen a competitor with transparent pricing. This is a documented financial mistake directly caused by the pricing architecture, not consumer error.
• The FTC’s Bureau of Economics research, cited in the complaint, documents that hidden fees force consumers to either “incur higher total search and cognitive costs or to make an incomplete, less informed decision.” This is a real burden: time spent, mental energy expended, and often a worse outcome anyway.
• The countdown clock on the Giants’ checkout screen compounded this harm. Consumers were required to simultaneously read a 15-page terms document, select delivery options, enter payment details, evaluate add-on purchases, and process an unexplained 45% price increase, all under time pressure. That is not a coincidence; it is a design choice.
• Working-class fans on tight budgets are disproportionately harmed. A $9 surprise fee on a $20 ticket is a 45% markup that could determine whether the trip is affordable at all. Wealthier fans absorb this as noise. For most people, it changes the calculation entirely.
• The complaint documents that once a consumer is on the timed checkout screen, they are psychologically committed to the purchase. The entire checkout architecture was designed to exploit the moment when a person is least able to walk away. This is a deliberate extraction of money from people in a vulnerable decision-making state.

Economic Inequality: When Honesty Punishes the Honest

Drip pricing does not just harm individual consumers. It structurally rewards deception in the marketplace and punishes companies that play by the rules.

• The complaint cites research demonstrating that “firms fiercely compete in base prices but not in drip prices,” meaning a company using drip pricing appears cheaper than honest competitors at the moment of initial comparison, even when its total price is equal or higher. The Giants, by advertising $10 tickets that actually cost $14.50, appeared to undercut any competitor showing a transparent $13 ticket at the browsing stage.
• The White House estimated that junk fees cost American consumers over $90 billion per year nationally. This is a system-level transfer of wealth from ordinary consumers to corporations operating at scale, executed through the gap between what people believe they’re agreeing to and what they actually pay.
• FTC research documents that after one market leader tried to eliminate hidden fees and show full prices, it “lost significant market share and abandoned the policy after a year because consumers perceived the platform’s advertised prices to be higher than its competitors.” This is the trap: the honest company looks more expensive, loses customers, and is eventually forced to reintroduce hidden fees to compete. Deception becomes the industry standard.
• The Giants collected Junk Fees at scale from hundreds of thousands of fans, then stopped the practice and kept all the money. The complaint argues the fees total millions of dollars. That represents a direct extraction of wealth from working-class sports fans, concentrated into a franchise worth billions of dollars.
• Fans who bought tickets expecting to pay $20 and paid $29 had less money for parking, food, merchandise, transportation, and everything else that comes with attending a live event. The ripple effect of drip pricing extends beyond the transaction itself into every spending decision made around it.
• The class action mechanism exists specifically to address this dynamic: individual damages are often small enough that no single victim can justify the cost of a lawsuit. The Giants’ system relied on this. The class action closes that gap, aggregating hundreds of thousands of small harms into a single, enforceable claim.

What the Math Actually Means

The Watchlist and Your Next Move

This case is active in federal court and the Giants have not refunded a dollar. Here is who is responsible and what you can do.

Who to Hold Accountable

The complaint names San Francisco Baseball Associates LLC as the defendant. The entity is a Delaware-registered limited liability company with its principal place of business in San Francisco, California. It operates the San Francisco Giants MLB franchise and Oracle Park stadium. The attorneys of record for the plaintiff class are:

• Wesley M. Griffith, Almeida Law Group LLC, Long Beach, CA (lead counsel)
• F. Peter Silva II, Tycko & Zavareei LLP, Chula Vista, CA
• David A. McGee, Almeida Law Group LLC, Washington, DC
• Loc G. Ho, Almeida Law Group LLC, New York, NY

The case is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California as Case No. 3:26-cv-00849, filed January 26, 2026.

Regulatory Watchlist

The following regulatory bodies have jurisdiction over the conduct described in this lawsuit and are the appropriate places to file complaints or demand enforcement action:

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): The FTC has already defined junk fees as a deceptive practice under 15 U.S.C. § 45(a)(1) and proposed the Unfair or Deceptive Fees Trade Regulation Rule (87 Fed. Reg. 67413). File a consumer complaint at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
• California Office of the Attorney General: The California AG issued guidance specifically about S.B. 478 compliance in May 2024 and has enforcement authority under both the UCL and FAL cited in this lawsuit. File at oag.ca.gov/consumers.
• California Department of Consumer Affairs: Has oversight over deceptive business practices in California commerce. File at dca.ca.gov.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): Federal agency with enforcement authority over junk fees in consumer transactions. File at consumerfinance.gov/complaint.

If You Were Affected: What To Do Right Now

• Locate your receipts. If you purchased Giants tickets online through mlb.com or the MLB Ballpark app and paid a service fee, convenience fee, or order processing fee that was not shown in the original price, you are a potential class member. Find your email confirmation showing the itemized charges.
• Contact plaintiff’s counsel directly. Almeida Law Group LLC can be reached at wes@almeidalawgroup.com (Wesley Griffith) or dmcgee@almeidalawgroup.com (David McGee). Tycko & Zavareei LLP can be reached at psilva@tzlegal.com (F. Peter Silva II). You do not need to hire your own attorney to join a class action.
• File regulatory complaints regardless of the lawsuit. The lawsuit seeks refunds. Regulatory complaints create public records, can trigger independent investigations, and may accelerate enforcement against the Giants and other MLB franchises using identical website infrastructure. The Washington Nationals were already the subject of a parallel action.
• Share this with other fans. The complaint notes that “many members of the Class may be unaware that they have legal recourse.” The Giants counted on fans not knowing their rights. The most effective grassroots action is making sure every Giants fan who bought tickets online between 2020 and July 2024 knows this case exists.
• Demand transparency from every team you support. The complaint documents that the Washington Nationals operated the same deceptive checkout system on the same MLB website infrastructure. This is a league-wide architecture, not a Giants-specific anomaly. Ask every team you follow whether their ticket fees were included in the displayed price.
• Support the Honest Pricing Act’s enforcement. California S.B. 478 is law, but laws without enforcement are suggestions. Contact your California state representative and the California Attorney General’s office to demand active enforcement of the Honest Pricing Act across all live event ticket sellers, not just MLB franchises.