With his computer synchronized to the world clock and two credit cards at the ready, Internet geek Brian Miller set out to do the impossible Tuesday. He tried to buy World Series tickets.
As co-workers counted down to a second before noon, Miller, a marketing assistant at search-engine company Info.com, clicked on a pair of Internet browser windows with extra emphasis. Seconds later, panic.
“Holy love of God, where did my window go?” said Miller, 23. “It’s choking on me. This is bogus!”
Blank screen. He tried again. No luck.
After 28 minutes and one futile, last-ditch request for a single seat to Game 6, Miller gave up.
For Miller and countless others, the scramble for World Series tickets was fruitless, an exercise in hopelessness marked with lagging Internet browsers, busy signals and error messages.
Tuesday showed how dramatically a winning season and a trip to the World Series have turned the economic fortunes for the White Sox–and ticket misfortunes for some fans.
Gone are the days of diehards pitching tents outside the ticket window; White Sox World Series tickets were sold exclusively online or by phone for the first time.
Those who got through at noon were entered in a queue of 130,000 users. “Several thousand” assorted seats for each of four possible home games, priced between $125 and $185, were gone in 18 minutes, said team spokeswoman Katie Kirby. The club did not release the exact number of tickets made available.
Before the Internet and phone sale, more than 1,000 season tickets for 2006 had been sold Monday and even more on Tuesday. These purchases entitled the buyers to tickets for this World Series–a marketing plan that allowed current demand for tickets to fill next year’s seats.
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“Season ticket-holders are valuable customers who make the commitment in advance, they fill the seats in April and September,” Kirby said. “We saw this as an opportunity to give those folks a reward now for committing to next year.”
The club sold 2.34 million regular-season tickets this year, an 18 percent increase over last year, Kirby said.
“A team’s success on the field translates the following season,” Kirby said. “We anticipate that our current success will mean success at the box office next year.”
As the World Series tickets sold out, the secondary market heated up.
Ticket reseller StubHub! sold a pair of seats six rows behind home plate for $7,500 each, according to spokesman Sean Pate. The least expensive seat on StubHub.com was $515 in the far reaches of the upper deck.
“We’ve sold 12 times as many tickets for this year’s World Series as we did for the Red Sox and Cardinals last year,” Pate said.
He estimated 10,000 tickets were probably made available Tuesday for each of the games at U.S. Cellular Field. That could be as many as four games or as few as two.
Sox fans’ Internet drama Tuesday underscores what fans in other cities have already found: The economy of sports has changed. Online sales allow a broad marketplace and flexibility–read guaranteed money for sellers.
But the online sales system favors the big broker operations over the average fan, said Thomas Smith, an economics professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
However, unlicensed sellers, or scalpers, have always had an edge, he noted. When ticket buyers had to stand in line outside a stadium, the scalpers were able to hire their friends or the homeless to purchase tickets en masse.
“They’ve got to put them on sale some way, but whatever way you do it, you’re going to end up with some goofy outcome,” Smith said. “There’s probably other ways to sell tickets that might be more equitable, but you’re always sort of slanting tickets to people with more and more resources.”
Some fans unwilling to admit defeat have been resorting to unorthodox ways to buy tickets.
One posting at Craigslist.org offered a healthy kidney–you choose left or right–for “two Sox tickets in the outfield!”
A woman who proclaimed to be a “125-lb., blonde hair, blue-eyed hot girl who (even loves baseball)” tried to leverage her looks for a chance to attend a game. Another woman offered to send “naughty pics” for tickets.
Jose Morales and Ray Antos, co-workers at Chicago’s SunGard Futures Systems, had another plan. They would rely on their computer savvy to land tickets at noon.
Last week, they decided they would work multiple computers and a handful of phones to reach Ticketmaster. They would call obscure offices–Duluth, Minn.; Tacoma, Wash.; someplace in Iowa–to avoid the jammed phone lines in Chicago.
The plan fell apart in minutes when those phone lines were just as jammed or out of tickets.
“We admitted defeat and said we’re not going to get it this way,” said Morales, 24.
They went to a broker on eBay.
“We knew it would happen,” Morales said. “We made the impulse decision to swallow and just take the hit and get the tickets.”
The seats? To say they’re way down the right-field line would be kind.
“We’re almost as high and as far back as you can get, pretty much,” Morales said of the far upper-deck seats. “We’re probably two or three rows from being able to climb the fence in the back, looking into the parking lot.”
The tickets cost them $720 apiece.
Miller, whose computer had gone blank at noon, said the system was unfair.
He had resorted to rubbing his pair of unused tickets to American League Championship Game 7 for good luck. He was prepared to max out his credit cards. All to no avail.
“You are not just competing with White Sox fans,” he said. “You are competing with scalpers and opportunists. That’s why Ticketmaster should quiz people like, ask who was the second baseman for the ’59 White Sox. That would work.”
Even Nellie Fox might have had a hard time finding a ticket Tuesday.
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