Earning profit from the resale of the team's tickets without telling fans is "unethical," says Richard Powers, associate professor Rotman School of Management.

"That is totally misleading and increases the cost to consumers," he said. "Getting in bed with the secondary market who they fight against all the time in every other venue, it just seems unethical."

After decades of battling scalpers, the Jays are now working with them, blurring the once clear line between the box office and secondary marketplace.

Tom Dakers, manager of Blue Jays fan blog Bluebird Banter, said half of opening day seats moving online is "incredible."

"Almost half? It sounds to me the team is cheating by saying, 'Our average ticket cost is this,' but in reality their average ticket cost is much higher because (so many) tickets are being sold on the secondary market," said Dakers, whose site has 10,000 members and one million page views a month.

"They've made the original sale and then they're getting a percentage of the second sale. That surprises me."

In a recent interview with Sportnet, Jays president Mark Shapiro said that today's home opener would be "the highest-revenue game in the history of Rogers Centre."

He spoke openly about wanting to grab a piece of the burgeoning online scalping market.

"We didn't think it was advantageous to have 50 per cent of our tickets controlled by the secondary market," he said. "The secondary market is a fact, we will always accept and even embrace a piece of that market, but we just wanted to clean that up to some extent."

That cleaning up amounts to reclaiming profits from ticket resellers profiting from higher prices many people pay online. Shapiro estimated almost half of the Jays' season-ticket holders last year were professional ticket "brokers."

The Star/CBC analysis shows the average ticket for today's game was priced at more than double face value on the online scalping market. This comes on top of box office price hikes in each of the last four seasons. The cost of the Jays' cheapest single game seat has risen by 50 per cent at the box office since 2014.

And since 2016, the Jays have used "dynamic pricing," where tickets to games against popular opponents are more expensive. That practice can drive up the face value of tickets for high-demand games nearly 70 per cent.

"Facilitating the secondary market, facilitating the scalpers who are really taking advantage of fans, that's dishonest and ... misleading and certainly goes against the image that they're trying to portray as sort of the good guy."

The analysis of ticket sales for the Jays' opening day game is an unprecedented attempt to quantify the size of the online scalping market. Journalists began monitoring online ticket resellers when they noticed almost 3,500 opening day seats available on StubHub weeks before tickets went on sale through the box office.

From the day tickets officially went on sale in February, reporters tracked each seat in the Rogers Centre as tickets moved from the box office to the online resale market.

The Star/CBC analysis showed it's easier to get a Jays seat for today's opening day game in the online aftermarket than from the box office. Only about 13,000 seats for today's game — out of a total stadium capacity of 45,811 (not including standing room tickets) — were placed for sale at the club's box office. More than 20,000 would eventually be posted for resale online.

The data collection was imperfect because of the complexity of tracking each seat over two months of heavy trading online. As a result, our analysis underestimates the number of scalped seats. The actual scope and size of the resale market can only be greater.

As the Star and CBC revealed last year in the Paradise Papers, StubHub secretly works with mass scalpers.

While StubHub says its mission is to "enable fans to buy and sell tickets," the online ticket reselling platform allows people who sell more than $250,000 worth of tickets annually to join its "Top Seller" program. This elite status provides mass scalpers with advanced pricing tools and charges them a lower commission than other resellers pay.

The discounts get better the more tickets you post, encouraging scalpers to employ bots and other automated technologies to harvest thousands of tickets for resale (the top category in the Top Seller program requires $5 million in annual sales) and making it harder for fans to purchase tickets at the box office.

StubHub's Lehrman wouldn't say how many Top Sellers were posting Blue Jays opening day seats. But speaking generally, ticket sellers on StubHub "are a mix of what we call consumer sellers and what we call professional sellers …. For baseball it's a pretty healthy mix of both."

The Star/CBC analysis also found that more than 16,085 tickets to the Jays home opener were posted at more than 150 per cent of face value — a markup that will soon be illegal.

Last December, Ontario passed legislation capping the profits of ticket resales at 50 per cent above face value. The law will enter into force July 1st.

"Fans want change," says Sophie Kiwala, and MPP from Kingston who spearheaded legislation after the 2016 Tragically Hip farewell tour was targeted by scalpers. "It's incumbent upon government and it's incumbent upon sports organizations to make sure that people still get access and that it's done in a manner of solid integrity."