Where can moving 5 feet to your left save you $21,725? At Camden Yards, of course.

On Tuesday night in the simmering August heat, I spent a good half hour contorting my brain to understand what is happening to Brian Moran, a front-row season ticket holder with plum seats in Section 56. When we spoke Saturday, he was irate — his full-season package price tag for seats near third base was quoted as costing 55% more, for a grand total of $34,225.

By Tuesday, he had reached a highly satisfactory compromise but was extremely confused — and soon so was I. A ticketing rep had offered him a steep discount, $12,500 for his two seats, if he would move from Section 56 to 58.

I asked Moran where his 2026 seats were compared to the ones we were sitting in. He pointed just across the aisle — a distance so short you could pass a beer over the rail.

“On this side of the line, it’s $34,000,” Moran said. “On that side of the line, it’s $12,000. It makes no sense.”

After spending the last week trying to digest stories I’m hearing from Birdland Members about their season ticket renewals and put the puzzle pieces together to deduce the master plan, that’s the biggest thing I’m struck by as well. Very little of what the Orioles are doing makes sense when taken as a whole.

Moran’s story is an outlier based on the sample of fans who have reached out to share their stories, but all over Camden Yards people are scratching their heads.

There are 300-level customers being told they have to get 81- or 40-game season packages or get displaced. As the club touts that these bigger (and higher-cost) packages offer better benefits, even at the 40-game level, there are fewer benefits than there were just a few years ago. Fans getting moved from their seats for renovations or construction work aren’t being given that explanation by their ticket reps.

The stated goal by President of Business Operations Catie Griggs — “Part of what we’re moving toward is greater transparency for our fans,” she said Thursday in a call-in to 105.7 The Fan — doesn’t square with how the Orioles are treating Birdland Members. Most of what I’ve heard is frustration and confusion.

An Orioles spokesperson did not respond to a request to speak to Griggs.

If the Orioles’ goal was to raise the stakes on season ticket holders, shepherding them into buying bigger packages with fewer overall benefits with only a short time to decide, they’re about to find a lot of fans ready to call their bluff.

I’m no finance or economics expert. When it comes to market rates and dynamic pricing models, you might have to speak to me a little slowly. But, even to a layman, the consequences of miscalculation here feel disastrous.

I spent the last few days talking to Janette Moser, a 40-year-old living in Manchester, who was having trouble accessing the Orioles’ online ticket portal after she was told she had to leave her Row 2 seats in Section 332, now earmarked for full-season ticket holders. After feeling flustered as she tried in vain to get a ticket rep on the phone for two days, she finally got a look at a 40-game package that would cost about $900 more than the 29-game package she’s paying for this season.

Everything that happened in the last week has left her shocked, she said. She still drives in from Carroll County for her games, even though the team sold off popular players at the MLB trade deadline and is in the standings cellar.

“I thought that they would kind of be like, ‘Please come back. We need people in the seats. We need some kind of dedicated cash flow.’” Moser said. “I don’t understand. We’re the only ones showing up and spending money with the team playing like it is. I just don’t get it. Who are you trying to court with these measures?”

Here’s what the Orioles say: These changes are in line with what 28 other major league teams have done to implement 20-, 40- and 81-game plans. The old 29- and 13-game packages are anachronisms. They also say the Orioles have been one of the best values in baseball for years leading up to this one. To get more in line with other baseball markets, the team says, this is what it has to do.

But here are a few other things that don’t make sense: Even though the franchise has supposedly wanted to implement these changes for years, the fan base is just learning of this now. Griggs has pointed to the guaranteed giveaways to Birdland Members as evidence of better perks — “we’ve been able to add some of the benefits that our members have been clamoring for,” she said on The Fan — but partial plan holders have noted the benefits are not what they used to be.

If you up your investment from 29 to 40 games, you still don’t get club-level access, which was taken away this year (partial plan holders can buy access with loyalty points). No plan gets an alcohol discount, which was also phased out for the 2025 season. The 40-game plan includes “guaranteed Opening Day access” for the number of seats you purchase — but does not include the cost of those opening day seats. And many people who spoke to me last week and this week are wondering why the sellback program is good only for 2027 renewal credit — a season in which the MLB could credibly have a lockout, and fans can’t be sure how many games will be played.

Does that sound like escalating perks?

The “flexibility” options for budget-conscious fans now include a 10-game package, which doesn’t carry benefits such as merchandise or food discounts, or flex plans, which were defanged themselves last year. But people who are considering those more affordable plans are wondering, if attendance doesn’t pick up (Camden Yards averages about 50% capacity this season), why wouldn’t they just pay as they go, or hawk up tickets on the secondary market if prices drop?

The Orioles’ strategy flies in the face of the answers to these questions.

Adding to the confusion is a rollout that has agitated customers even more. The Orioles have said the conversations between ticket reps and their Birdland Members have gone relatively well in the face of difficult changes, which I heard from many people as well. But getting reps on the phone hasn’t been easy. The Orioles make it a point to handle customer service internally — “It allows us to learn firsthand from the fan so that we can listen and respond,” an Orioles spokesperson said — but the trade-off is that some fans (like Moser) have been waiting a long time to hear from their reps.

Jake Gardner was disappointed to learn he was getting kicked out of his Row 2 seats in Section 47 (slightly to the right of home plate and covered from sun and rain) and even more disappointed to learn, if he had been in Row 3, he might not have been moved. It was more confusing when it seemed no comparable seats were available in adjacent sections.

Talking through the issue with the Orioles, Gardner and I learned that Section 47 seats will be especially affected by renovations that will extend the press box into covered areas that are currently occupied by some of Gardner’s seat mates. That revelation made it easier to understand, but why didn’t he hear that from his ticket rep?

The short window to decide and the lack of transparency only aggravated Gardner, who kept his 29-game package this season even though his wife had a baby in April so they could have access to the same seats in 2026. They couldn’t attend many games this year, and now they don’t even get to keep their spot. Gardner, a baseball fanatic who volunteers at the Babe Ruth Museum, was gutted by the decision — as of Thursday, he thought he would probably step down to a 20-game package unless the Orioles would be willing to let him stay in his seats.

“This feels like I’m losing out on everything I’ve been building up over the years,” he said.

Stephen Knable’s family has built up as much loyalty as I’ve ever heard. His grandparents bought tickets in 1954 when the Orioles relocated to Baltimore, then settled in Row 16 seats in Section 32 in 1992 when the games moved to Camden Yards. He inherited the 29-game package seats from his grandfather, and his 9- and 7-year-old have grown up in the same seats where Knable has been going to games for more than 30 years.

When he got a notice that his row had been relocated for full-season plans, Knable was given just five days to decide if he could justify increasing his investment by thousands of dollars and 52 games.

“It’s the only seats I’ve ever really known,” said the 44-year-old Pikesville resident, who has 1992 opening day tickets for those seats framed on a wall in his house. “I wasn’t prepared emotionally for that. … I don’t know how you wipe the slate clean for people who have been going to the games for their whole lives.”

What might be most difficult is to discern exactly what the Orioles are hunting for here. On the one hand, many of the changes suggest a single-minded charge at more revenue, asking fans to increase up-front money and commitment or risk losing seats they’ve grown sentimentally attached to.

Still, the story of Moran saving $22,000 sticks out as a curiosity. The Orioles attributed the 5-foot, five-figure difference to “a bit of an outlier” in how they price different sections.

“Sometimes there can be steep drop-offs in pricing from one section to another outside of the bases,” an Orioles spokesperson wrote. “All pricing is based on those seats’ anticipated demand.”

That is one hell of a drop-off. The invisible barrier of cost between those two sections hints at some other aspect that it feels the Orioles aren’t being transparent about — are there really so many fans of this sub-.500 baseball team eager to shell out more than $34,000 for two slightly nicer seats? The whole thing is like a brain teaser, except trying to figure out the answer is driving me batty.

What we have are individual threads and stories, a collage of social media posts and comments, out of which Birdland Members can try to make sense of what the Orioles think they’re doing. But, if you try to make it all fit into one grand vision, you probably won’t get far.

Griggs mentioned in her radio appearance that she understands the challenges of fans with children because she has two of her own, and yet family-friendly 13- and 29-game packages are being erased. The Orioles appear to be courting big-whale ticket holders, but that seems fairly optimistic in a blue-collar town whose fans have especially relished the value of their ticket packages.

They’ve forced consumers to make decisions on their packages within days — sometimes leading to these members bitterly deciding not to renew. For whatever financial return these decisions may offer, making fandom harder for the less affluent fans probably has poisonous long-term consequences, and they risk alienating the middle-class folks who have fueled this franchise for decades.

Moser was one of the people who told me renewing tickets didn’t seem like the best option for her.

“Considering all of the above combined with the decrease in perks, the seeming disinterest to improve the team, the tone deafness of the stadium ‘upgrades,’ and the fact that they haven’t gotten out in front of this to placate anyone’s concerns I may not renew,” she wrote me. “I’ll certainly sleep on it, but it seems like an exercise in masochism at this point.”

Bruce Voelker, a 13-game plan holder for the last dozen years, summed it up well.

“The Orioles had the perfect package to offer local fans,” he wrote, “and now they’ve gone and ruined it.”

The only thing left to figure out is why.