One thing about having crappy baseball teams in the area: If you want to go to a game, especially on a weeknight, there’s no reason to pay the list price for tickets.

I bought a half-dozen season tickets out of someone else’s plan back in February, and those are the only tickets I’ve purchased at retail all year. I will admit to paying *above* retail for one game — I paid an extra $10 to see Strasburg’s debut and that was the best $10 I’ve ever spent — but I’ve been to a bunch of Nats games this year where I paid far below list.

Unfortunately, the best source for those tickets is one I can’t share with you. The Nats offered employees and friends of its corporate partners, whatever that means, a chance to buy field-level corner seats for most games for $10 in the back half of the year. The usual scam fees bring the ticket price to $17, but since my wife works for WTOP, I’m eligible for those. I’m going to my fourth game Wednesday using those tickets, and I haven’t sat any more than eight rows from the field, down the line.

There are other perfectly legit sources. You occasionally can find someone dumping a seat on StubHub, although tickets there usually are listed *above* retail. Here’s some RetailMeNot codes that will knock 40% off the price of selected Nats tickets. Goldstar Events has discounted Nats and O’s tickets for selected games (and right now, they’ve also got some seriously discounted Cirque du Soilel tickets for some upcoming midweek D.C. performances). And of course, there’s always Craigslist.

Nobody’s really talking about the fact that the Nats appear to have regressed and the O’s have progressed in the last couple of months. In part, this is because both teams are still so bad. But they’re the closest thing you can get in this area to major league baseball, so you might as well buy your tickets at a discount.