I just spent the day in the “Virtual Waiting Room” trying to get a couple or four tickets to just about any game this season. The goal was to be able to go to a game or two with people. I was released from the interminable waiting room twice. The first time, I was greeted with an image of a seating chart for a random Tigers game, but anytime I tried to click through to select seats, I was greeted with the following: “We’re sorry, we were unable to process your request due to high transaction volumes. Please try to submit your request again by clicking the CONTINUE button.” (Clicking CONTINUE just gave me the same message.) Eventually I was booted back to the waiting room.
Finally, about 20 minutes ago, I was let out of the waiting room again. Only now I was told that the only seats together were standing room only. Grrr… going to baseball games should not be this hard. Maybe it’s time to be a Paw Sox fan.
Jan24
Colossus of Rhode 
Well even without the quasi-religious nonsense about ‘faith’ that surrounds pro sports everywhere, and leaving aside the achievement-by-proxy that is the masturbatorily masculine fandom model of arena sports, at the end of the day the Red Sox owners make colossal amounts of money by selling tickets to a too-small park to an enormous fan base from all over the region – they’re not civil servants, they’re the usual titan-of-business swine, no matter how long they’ve soaked money off this city. Whatever the merits of their particular team, what they do is silly in ways we don’t really know how to discuss anymore. What we do, watching, is also silly – but delusional as it seems it’s at least not criminal.
They don’t have to build a good experience to roll around in filthy lucre, so why waste the effort? People will still show up in droves, will still talk about the games as if the difference between a player who makes $166,000 per day (Alex Rodriguez) and a player who makes twice times that much per year (the minimum salary for major leaguers accordng to the current collective bargaining agreement) is some kind of religious revelation, is meaningful when compared to the sweep of non-baseball-playing humanity. Our expectations are fucked up; we seem to have bundles of faith to spend, but or choices of destination are very poor indeed. The basis for the decision isn’t reason – nor is it love. I wonder what it is.
Sorry to carry on like this, haven’t denigrated baseball fandom in a while, needed a break. 🙂
I went to a number of PawSox games this past summer and I loved it. Sure, you have to drive an hour to get there, but the tickets are cheap, the baseball is good and the atmosphere is awesome. The only time it sucked was when Ortiz was just coming back from his injury and then the place turned into a mad house.