California, show your teeth

Anybody get World Series tickets?

Not any readers. Literally, did anybody get World Series?

In a way that people who didn't try to buy tickets will never fully understand, the Rockies' public ticket sales for their remaining World Series seats went horribly. Just about everything that could have gone wrong did.

It didn't have to be this way. The Rockies initially planned to sell tickets through their usual outlets, as well as through their website. Then a couple days ago, they announced they'd be selling tickets exclusively through their website. (That's www.coloradorockies.com. Don't bother going there, though. It never works.) I'll admit, though, that I was glad they were only selling online. I don't live in Denver and would have had no chance to make it to Coors Field or wherever.

The website said tickets were going to go on sale October 22 (that's yesterday) at 10 a.m. So I camped out with a pair of computers, preparing an all-out bandwidth assault. I know what I'm doing, right? Meanwhile David (the David who went to the NLCS with me) is holding it down on the West Coast. So we're ready. And we're off!

Aaaaaand...lost connection. Well, let's hit refresh five million times and see what happens, eh? Let's just say a lot of brave connections died out there yesterday. A couple of times, though, there was a glimmer of sunshine. Loading! What, pray tell, does it say?

"Tickets will go on sale at 10 a.m. on October 22nd."

That may not be a direct quote. It was hard to read through the tears. Anyway, kept trying, kept trying, kept trying. At 10:29, my girlfriend sends me a worrisome but fortunately not-true-at-all e-mail saying the tickets had sold out in eight minutes. About an hour into things, David found a post by a guy on Craigslist who said he'd contacted the server company and had been told that the servers were down because of the fires in California. At one point I completely guessed and said to David that the Rockies had probably been taken out by a denial-of-service attack. However, time passed with no website changes or announcements from the Rockies.

Finally, at around quarter to noon, with the "F5" rubbed off my keyboard, the Rockies announced that they were going to have a press conference at 12:20. A press conference? Hmmm, sounds official. But all it ended up being was Rockies spokesman Jay Alves standing on the sidewalk, announcing the suspension of ticket sales. Also, they'd announce more later. Now why they'd waited forty minutes to tell us that is a mystery.

Later in the day I returned to find out an announcement was scheduled for 5 p.m. That meant rushing home from work to plant in front of my TV, only to learn absolutely nothing. Well, I learned that the Rockies' idea of a scheduled announcement is different from everyone else's. Eventually, the team announced that they'd announce something before 10, so I finally got to leave the house. I was hoping the tickets would actually go back on sale at 10, if only to thwart potential Boston usurpers, but instead, it was today at noon.

Also at some point last night, the problems were blamed on a denial-of-service attack. Point, me.

Today went a lot like yesterday, with the notable addition of scare tactics. The website, you see, had some changes. The old page refreshed itself every sixty seconds, or at least attempted to make you believe it would. The new one had a 120-second timer and a message, saying you'd lose your spot in line if you hit refresh.

Yesterday the timer occasionally froze on one second before restarting, but would eventually result in a lost connection. Today, it was different. It was refreshing reliably, but would eventually stay on 1 while it seemed to load another page. This happened only a couple minutes in on the MacBook, leading me to believe I was about to get in to buy. Instead, it stayed that way for hours. My desktop, on the other hand, reliably displayed a "the network connection has timed-out" message. Thanks! And, oh, by the way, we've had website counters for at least a decade. So why couldn't the system tell you what spot in line you had?

Eventually the tickets got sold, but I didn't get any. Is it time to overpay for seats? Probably.

So, what have we learned?

1) People are greedy bastards. Everyone I heard discussing it, myself included, was going for the maximum of four tickets. The logic being that we wouldn't be satisfied with World Series tickets, we needed a surplus of them! Of course, everyone had cross deals with each other to share the tickets, making it even more absurd. We also all had plans to sell the extras.

2) The Rockies rock. Don't blame the Rockies for this mess. Instead, appreciate that we're in the mess for two reasons. First, the Rockies are on an historic tear. This is a good thing. The second, frankly, is that tickets were too cheap.

The tickets available ranged from $65 (Rockpile seats) to $250, I think. I was shocked when I found out they were that inexpensive. It lead to two problems. First, scalpers get to make up the difference of what the Rockies could have charged. Second, it means everyone in the state who wanted to go thought they could afford it. Start Rockpile tickets at $125 or $150 apiece, and watch the demand drop to more manageable levels. However, I'm not going to complain that someone wanted to sell me World Series tickets at a ridiculously good price.

3) Coloradans are experts at understanding business principles. Seriously. I read in one story yesterday where a guy complained that he couldn't get through. He'd been to one game already this year and sat in the Rockpile for $4.

Uh, no offense bro, but you're not the kind of customer the Rockies need to be coddling. You gave the team four dollars? The only fans with legitimate complaints are season-ticket holders who couldn't get through during Sunday's pre-sale. That's pretty much it. (News stories painted some of these season-ticket holders as rubes unable to understand a Web browser, which was fun to read, but it still sucks for them.) Now I'd love it if we all got tickets, but the Rockies don't really owe everyone in Denver seats. You want seats? Raise taxes and make a bigger stadium.

4) Side note: the ticket-buying policies suck to begin with. As part of the rush to get NLCS tickets, David ponied up for two seats to Game 5 of that series. Thankfully, the Rockies automatically refunded everyone's money. Well, not everyone's, but they refunded his, since he paid with a credit card. Well, technically they didn't refund his, but they let him call an 800-number and ask for a refund. Well, they didn't so much have an 800-number, but at least they let him mail his tickets back and get a refund in his account the day they arrive. Well, more accurately, he got to mail his tickets back, and was told to expect a refund check to be mailed to him in four to six weeks.

That's just absurd. Now we knew this going in and decided it was worth the risk anyway. But it's still pretty lame. What other company could get away with this? I mean, Apple, one of the hottest brands in America, dropped the price of their superphone months after people bought it, and people still whined and cried until they got some store credit. Yet no one complains about sports teams doing stuff that's way worse than a price cut (which actually isn't a bad thing at all). Just remember, sports are still king in this country.

5) Jay Alves is a crappy webmaster. You'd get this impression perusing reader comments on local news websites, anyway. It was bad enough that some people thought the Rockies were trying to run the sale themselves. But the folks who seemed to think Alves deserved blame really take the cake.

You know what a spokesman does, right? It's not like having a real job. It's just talking about the job other people are doing. And Alves is not bad at that. The only thing he really sucks at is being on time for the press announcements he schedules.

All right, I'm oversimplifying. But seriously, it's not his fault that Paciolan was trying to sell World Series tickets from a single 386 in their basement.

Fans' sense of entitlement didn't stop there. I actually read one guy who said he was going down to Coors Field with his co-workers to protest. (And this was yesterday. Little did he know.) This all happened while I still thought the fires in California were to blame. Yes, people are losing everything they have, but I want Series tickets! Though I never heard anyone officially blame or even mention the fires, the idea sure helped me keep my cool.

Still though, it was annoying. And I think just a little feedback on the website would have gone a long way. "You're 118,000th in line." "We're not selling any more tickets today." "Get a life." That sort of thing.

Think I'm done venting now!