I definitely see your point of view and was one I did for a handful of seasons. I also tend to disagree with it after those handful of years. The carrot definitely were/are the Opening Day access, same seats, playoff options, etc. That said, where I disagree is that you can go online today and get seats 20 rows behind the 1st base dugout for Opening Day. As mentioned by people above, more and more people can wait to see how the season is going and then lock in playoff tickets if they're doing well. I also was apart of a group that had incredible seats, but I only took about a dozen of the 81 games, so when it came to playoff access, although they had every game I was only guaranteed on Divisional game. I went online and was able to get all possible games for the ALCS And ALDS (in 2021) and most of my seat locations were in that same range of 15-20 rows behind the 1st base or 3rd base dugouts. After i saw that, I just said to myself, why am I locking into random dates of games months ahead of time, forking over thousands of dollars? I was generally unhappy with the situation.
The carrot isn't as sexy when you have access regardless of your season tickets. The way I look at it is I can apply the money saved on a 10, 15, 20 game plan and just apply it to great seats a few regular season games and then just spend it on playoff games. Also, from a business angle, I couldn't find anybody who wanted to go in 2022. I was eating like $400 of seats a game cause I couldn't find anybody who had interest. 2021 was great, 2022 was a disaster and i suspect 2023 will be even tougher to get clients to a game.