The Red Sox and Ticket Lotteries in General
I have been rejected, seemingly over and over this season. I’m sure many of you can relate. I’ve been getting a lot of emails that look like this:
In case you can’t quite read it, I’ll summarize:
Dear Die Hard Red Sox Fan,
We’re sorry, but you will not be able to see a game from the Green Monster this year unless you go buy them on Stubhub from some scalper who entered 3,467 email addresses into this lottery.
The Red Sox will continue to pretend that they care about keeping tickets off the resale market and add insult to injury by offering you a crappy 10% off coupon for ridiculously overpriced merchandise from the “official store” that slighly differs from what you could get at Modell’s.
Here’s hoping you get that raise so you can fork it all over to pay Matt Clement’s salary,
The “Fan Friendly” Boston Red Sox
Pardon the sarcasm, but that is exactly how I feel. Now I am not suggesting that I am somehow more entitled to tickets on the Green Monster (or any other tickets for that matter) than anyone else. I just think that a random lottery doesn’t do anyone any good. Why not let fans line up days ahead of time, like the good old days before we did everything online? Let anyone who is in line buy tickets to one game and leave it at that. Will scalpers still get tickets? Yes, of course, but I don’t think they’d get any more by having people wait in line than they would by doing it all with online lotteries.
The advantage to the old fashioned wait in line method is that the Sox fans who care the most (you and me since you’re reading my blog) are the ones who are willing to camp out for days. And those fans, the ones who have the real passion and desire to pay $160 for an upper deck seat, get to go. Not just some random dude who sent his email address in and got lucky.
Perhaps I am just frustrated. I’ve entered every conceivable lottery the Sox have ever had. I’ve won exactly once, a second chance drawing for Yankees tickets last year. And I got 4 upper bleachers ticket for a game in April. Yee haw - Luck of the draw put me under the center field scoreboard once in 4 years. Why can’t I just go wait in line and get my Monster tickets, playoff tickets, and everything else? Why must we continue to use a system that does nothing more than add margin to every ticket brokers business?
Get with the program Red Sox. Start making decisions that actually accommodate your biggest fans, not just the fans with the most email addresses.
Stumble it!
March 17th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Have you seen the season ticket holder letter that just came out? Its disgusting, Sam Kennedy explains his reasons for making Ace Ticket the official “offline” broker of the Red Sox. I don’t have a problem with the secondary market, its capitalism. I have trouble with the team shaming resellers and then entering into contracts like this. For years I have been getting letters, don’t sell your tickets online, don’t sell for more than face value, don’t use brokers. And then all of a sudden it was okay you can use a broker as long as it is Stubhub. I don’t like StubHub, they charge 25% on every transaction, why should I use them? So I used eBay and my auction got removed by MLB for using eBay. Hello, eBay owns Stub Hub, 100% of it! Does anyone see the hypocrisy here. So now they tell me to sell my extra tickets to Ace Tickets. I called Ace and they told me they would give me $35 for my extras. Thats not bad, but they are selling for $85. Why can’t I sell for $85? Its ridiculous.