Why Capital One Venture / Venture X are the best Credit Cards for MLB Fans

View from Capital One’s exclusive seats for Brewers Opening Day 2024

Our main focus at Fare Game Travel is certainly travel, typically on points, whether earned via credit card sign up bonus and credit card spend. Outside of travel rewards, there is typically very limited circumstances where you can earn significant return from credit card spend.

Capital One is by far one of our favorite companies out there when it comes to travel rewards, especially via the Capital One Venture and Capital One Venture X. Both cards earn a straightforward 2 miles per $1 spent (and 5-10x on travel via their portal), so unlike most rewards cards there are no category bonuses to keep track of and no need to worry about which card to use on what purchase. Both cards offer a sign up bonus of 75,000 miles after spending $4,000 within the first 3 months of holding the card. The other great thing about Capital One cards, is points post shortly after a charge posts, as do the bonuses. That means if you opened a card on Saturday, hit the minimum spend for the bonus with a large purchase after receiving the card on Tuesday, you could possibly see the points post by Friday. This is not typical with credit cards and most points and bonuses post after the statement is issued, so sometimes you might have a redemption in mind or be short on points, but need to wait up to a month for points to post to be able to use them.

While travel is certainly where a majority of all of our miles are spent, there is one circumstance where we may sometimes use miles outside of travel which is unique to Capital One - Excellent tickets to MLB Games. Capital One is the official bank and credit card partner of MLB and as the official partner they offer 4 tickets to all 2,430 MLB games via what are essentially season tickets for every MLB team. Capital One releases the same 4 tickets for each game, typically a month at a time which can be purchased for 5,000 miles per ticket in quantities of 2. These tickets vary in location based on team, but are typically excellent tickets valued at $100 per ticket or more. Popular teams and dates obviously get picked up pretty quickly, but last year we were able to redeem miles for 2 Cubs - Brewers games at American Family Field in Milwaukee. This year we were able to secure tickets to opening day at American Family Field. At this particular stadium, the tickets are located in the Field Diamond Platinum Section, 5 rows directly behind home plate. The face value of the tickets in this section in 2024 range from $97 for a mid week, non premium game, to $302 for a premium weekend game against the Cubs. That means if you were to redeem miles for 4 seats to see a Brewers game via Capital One’s exclusive seats, for 20,000 points, you would receive between $388-$1,208 in value which equates to 1.94 - 6 cents per point. Since these cards earn 2 points per $1 spent, this essentially equates to a 3.88%-12% return on your credit card spend (Not including any potential sign up bonus). This means, used miles just for baseball tickets, using the sign up bonus and points earned from the spend for the sign up bonus (83,000 miles total) you could get 2 tickets to 8 games, or 4 tickets to 4 games with a total value of $1,552 - $4,832. This rivals even the best best business class redemptions using miles. Keep in mind, this is just one example of tickets in one of MLBs smallest markets, so you can expect to get at least that value or more from many teams, especially for popular games.

To find tickets for Capital One Exclusive events, you just need to log in to Capital One, go to the Entertainment Tab under Rewards

Then click access MLB Tickets

Then you can search by team, for both home and away games

From here, you can scroll through all games, both home and away. If the Capital One tickets are available for a particular game you will see Cardholder Exclusive highlighted in blue above the event.

If you click on Cardholder Exclusive or Get Tickets, it should take you to the event Page where you should only see one section highlighted with tickets available at 5,000 miles each. If this is what you see, these are the Capital One tickets.

Here is another example of available tickets, for a Chicago White Sox game.

If you click on a game that does not have the Cardholder Exclusive note above it, you will see a normal seat map with resale market availability which are offered via Vividseats. While you can purchase resale tickets with your Capital One Miles, this isn’t a great redemption value and I would not recommend booking with points.

Overall, I feel like this is certainly an overlooked benefit of Capital One cards and adds significant value for baseball fans. As of writing, tickets have only been released through 5/31 (and most games, especially for large market teams are gone) and June tickets are likely to be released in the next week or two. Generally tickets are released a calendar month at a time for all games. This means you could still catch your favorite team this year from excellent seats if you apply today!

If you are interested in applying for the Capital One Venture or Capital One Venture X, please consider using our referral links so we can continue to produce more content like this! See you at a baseball game soon!