Apple's Passbook: Helping to make baseball tickets extinct

According to a post on MarketWatch today, Major League Baseball would love to stop selling paper tickets. It turns out that Apple's Passbook might very well help them to accomplish that goal during the next year.

Traditional ticket sales have been dropping quite a bit anyway -- from 55 percent in 2011 to less than 33 percent so far this year -- as fans are picking up tickets from MLB and other outlets (most notably StubHub) in digital formats. But Passbook was apparently a huge hit in a test run during the final two weeks of the 2012 regular season.

Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB Advance Media, told MarketWatch that during the test with four teams, 1,500 e-ticket buyers -- or about 12 percent -- chose delivery through Passbook. Said Bowman, "That adoption rate really floored us -- there is no question our fans want digital tickets. Fans can use the tickets, forward them to a friend, resell them or even donate them to charity -- and they never get lost or left at home."

If you happen to attend an MLB Playoff or World Series game this fall, hold onto your physical ticket if you get one. It may very well be a collector's item in the near future.