It turned out to be more like an election day for the Rockies yesterday than a day selling tickets for the first ever World Series in Colorado.
Millions of fans around the country began clicking their mouse at 10 a.m. yesterday hoping to score tickets, yet scored a day of watching the Internet.
Just like during presedential elections, people constantly updated their web pages not looking for poll results, yet ticket information.
After fans spent the first couple hours of their monday morning constantly clicking on the “buy tickets” icon, the Rockies finally released a statement after rumors began to fly.
Everything from all the tickets being sold out in seven minutes to not one ticket being sold to the Rockies changing their mind and selling tickets at the box office were being talked about across the DU campus and media Web sites.
The truth finally came out when club spokesman Jay Alves appeared outside Coors Field and adressed the media and couple hundred frustrated fans.
“Right now we’re shutting the system down, we expect to be online at some point,” remarked Alves to the displeasure of boisterous Rockies fans.
Alves later announced a 5 p.m. press conference that turned into 6:15 p.m. stating “we are still working on the problem and will be back before 10 p.m.”
At 8 p.m. last night the Rockies finally announced that ticket sales will resume at noon today on their Web site www.Coloradorockies.com. In the statement the team said that the system was brought down by an “external malicious attack.”
The Rockies opponent in the World Series, Boston Red Sox are series veterans and came up with a much better plan to their ticket selling.
A couple weeks ago, well before the World Series, the Sox allowed all that wanted to buy series tickets to enter a random online drawing. The drawing attracted over 350,000 fans and those that won bought tickets at a private sale.
Yesterday the Rockies had over 8.5 million hits on their website in the first 90 minutes the tickets went on sale.
The ticket prices vary from $65 for rock pile tickets to $250 for infield seats.
The Rockies could have avoided problems by 1. selling tickets at an early date, avoiding thousands of Red Sox fans now knowing that they are going to the World Series 2. Having a similar system to that of the Red Sox to create a more organized and less frustrating way of buying tickets.
The organization had originally announced that they were going to not only sell tickets online, but also in person at the Coors Field and Rockies Dugout store locations. In person there would be a lottery system to determine the order of what people buy tickets.
This was abandoned a few days later and the Rockies assured all fans that the web site would be able to handle all volumes of hits.
The late release of face-value tickets is causing many ticket hopefuls to look into scalping tickets instead.
Infield tickets at Coors Field are currently going for between $1,400 and $5,500 on Ebay.com and Stubhub.com. A pair of Rockpile tickets will run you a cheap $700-850 a pair.
Scalping prices are expected to decline after the remainder of tickets are finally sold by the Rockies.
The World Series format is 2-3-2, with the home team playing the first two, the visitors (Rockies) playing the next three and the home team playing host to the final two games if necessary,
The league that wins the All-Star game determines who is the home and visiting team. Obviously the American League won the mid-summer classic this season.
An approximate 17,000 tickets are said by the Rockies to be available for the Saturday, Sunday and Monday home games.
