The best-known baseball brand in the world is making a big switch.

The New York Yankees are dumping Ticketmaster for StubHub as its ticket resale partner, in a six-and-a-half-year, $100 million deal that begins on July 15. “Many more fans will now have access to tickets,” says a StubHub spokesperson.

But make no mistake: This move has very little to do with catering to customers.

In 2012, when Major League Baseball named eBay-owned (EBAY) secondary market site StubHub as its official resale partner, only the Yankees and the Los Angeles Angels (not the Dodgers, as said in the video above) opted out and stuck with Ticketmaster (LYV). The Yankees’ official resale partner was Ticketmaster, on a site called Yankees Ticket Exchange. StubHub now replaces that site.

Under the old deal, the Yankees set a “floor,” or minimum price rule at which sellers could sell their tickets. The floor varied each game based on a number of factors. In other words, the Yankees held all the keys to the pricing kingdom.

Under the new StubHub deal, there is still a floor, and no ceiling. The new floor, which the team and StubHub are not referring to as a floor but as “Minimum Advertised List Pricing by Section,” is 50% of the season ticket-holder price. That is: If you, a season ticket-holder, are looking to sell a ticket that cost you $50, you cannot sell it for less than $25. StubHub’s own price floor for all MLB games, imposed last year, is $6. But StubHub CEO Scott Cutler said that if the Yankees floor had been in place already this season, it would only affect "about 100" of the 51,000 Yankees tickets StubHub currently has to offer for the season, a claim reporters doubted. (See a followup story here in which Yahoo Finance exposed serious doubt to this claim.) “Nobody’s pricing below that anyway at this point,” says a StubHub spokesperson. “No one wants to, and that’s not what the market is dictating.”

That’s not entirely true. The market isn’t dictating those minimums; the Yankees are. Last season, the Yankees saw a 6.5% drop in attendance, according to Baseball Reference, in a year when overall attendance at MLB games was up. It was the sixth-largest attendance drop of all 30 teams. The Yankees had an average game attendance of 39,430. This season, attendance is down again, to an average of 38,313. (Yankee Stadium has a capacity of 49,000.) The team has a .500 record and is in second-to-last place in its division. The Yankees still have the most expensive season tickets in the league.

So the team is bad and the stadium is never full, but the Yankees still don’t want anyone getting into a game cheaply.

Another major headache of going to Yankee Stadium will not be alleviated either. This season, for the first time, the Yankees banned print-at-home tickets. It meant that if you bought a ticket from someone else, you could not print the ticket out or even pull up the PDF on your phone in an email attachment; neither was acceptable. You had to have the Ticketmaster app on your phone and pull up the Ticketmaster QR code to get in. (Old-fashioned, heavy-stock tickets from the official team box office are still accepted.)

The Yankees said publicly that the reason for banning print-at-home tickets was to prevent fraud, reasoning that resale sites like StubHub are more prone to fraudulent tickets. (The team honored an average of five fraudulent tickets per game last season from StubHub.) But the ban was also a strategic move to cut out StubHub, which didn’t have the ability to send fans a mobile ticket, since Ticketmaster was the official partner. As a result of the StubHub switch, StubHub can now close down an office it had near the stadium that existed solely for StubHub buyers to pick up an official ticket, from a seller who had to drop it off there in person.

And a comment Yankees COO Lonn Trost made on WFAN radio last February suggested other reasons than fraud for the printed ticket ban: “If you buy a ticket in a very premium location and pay a substantial amount of money,” he said, “it’s not that we don’t want that fan to sell it, but that fan is sitting there having paid a substantial amount of money for a ticket.” The new fan that buys the ticket cheaply, Trost continued, “may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.” Translation: We don’t want the type of people who can’t afford certain seats to ever end up sitting in those seats.

When the team announced the new StubHub deal, many fans on Twitter were hopeful that the print-at-home policy would now change. It will not. Only mobile tickets will be accepted, the team tells Yahoo Finance, making the Yankees the sole MLB team with mobile-only ticketing. Sellers can post hard-copy tickets for sale, but StubHub will convert them into mobile tickets after the sale. (At least fans won’t be forced to download the StubHub app; StubHub says fans can screenshot or download the ticket in a text message or email. But StubHub will never send tickets by PDF.) To date, 250,000 fans have used mobile tickets, and the Yankees now expect the switch to mobile-only will result in 600,000 mobile tickets used by the end of this season, which would be a league record. StubHub will also get to advertise inside the stadium.

The new system with StubHub does not apply to NYCFC, the Major League Soccer team that launched last year and plays its games in Yankee Stadium, StubHub confirmed. This year, the Yankee Stadium print-at-home ticketing ban began with the first NYCFC game of the season, and it was a complete disaster. Many fans had not known about the ban, and showed up with printed-at-home tickets; those fans were funneled to a single gate, and many ended up waiting for nearly an hour and missing much of the event. NYCFC did not respond to requests for comment.

Yankees president Randy Levine said in a statement that the new deal provides Yankees fans with “a first-class ticket experience.” And a StubHub spokesperson says the new system means, “there’s no need to ever deal with the guys in front of the stadium [scalpers] anymore. You could literally get on the line with no ticket and by the time you’re up front, you’ve bought a ticket.”

That scenario sounds nice, but only for the tech-savvy and those willing to cough up at least half what season ticket-holders pay. “People are getting used to mobile,” says a Yankees spokesperson. “They like it.” Too bad for anyone without a smartphone, and for anyone who might wish to catch a game cheaply.

Note: The video above, shot before the Yankees announced more information at a press conference, states that printed tickets will be allowed at Yankee Stadium; as the article explains, that is in fact not the case.

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Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.

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