A hedge fund operated by StubHub's CEO Eric Baker has been quietly purchasing large blocks of tickets from three high profile005 Major League Baseball teams that are then sold on the StubHub platform, as well as other competing marketplaces like SeatGeek and Vivid Seats.

For the last decade, Andro Capital has been part of a growing consolidation movement in professional sports to help teams exert greater control over how their tickets are priced and resold on the secondary market. Ever since the launch of sites like StubHub in the 2000s, professional teams have carefully monitored how their tickets are priced on resale sites. A broker significantly marking down a pair of tickets to an unpopular or slow game can have a significant impact on the team's own ability to sell similar tickets directly from the box office. After all — why would a fan spend $50 per ticket from the team when they can find a broker online willing to offload the bad games at steep discounts.

Brokers are often forced to buy tickets to less desirable games in order to get access to purchase tickets for the more popular home games featuring local rivalries and big ticket matchups. In fact, some brokers make the bulk of their tickets in the playoffs and don't really care what the regular season tickets will generate, especially if they know the team has a shot of going deep into the World Series.

Again, that's a challenge for teams who don't want to see the tickets they're selling at the box office compete against tickets marked down by brokers looking to make a few bucks. One solution several teams came up with in the 2010s was to limit the number of brokers the team sold tickets to. For some teams, the number of participating brokers shrunk from dozens to just one or two. Suddenly longtime mom and pop ticket brokers that operated in major cities with brick and mortar stores were seeing their access to season tickets blocked by large-scale ticket brokers capable of deploying tens of millions of dollars to buy up a team's entire secondary market, effectively controlling the price of tickets on the secondary ticket market.