A team official says that only 1 out of 28 people who tried to buy tickets online succeeded during last weekend's opening of sales.

01:00 AM EST on Saturday, December 18, 2004

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

The Boston Red Sox finally won the World Series, but hundreds of thousands of their fans are still singing the loser's lament: Wait till next year.

That's because the team held a ticket sale last weekend for 52 of its 81 home games, and more than 700,000 prospective buyers logged on to the ticketing Web site.

The demand was so great that only 1 out of 28 people who tried to buy tickets online succeeded, according to Ron Bumgarner, the team's senior adviser for ticketing. Another 2,700 people bought tickets last Saturday and Sunday by lining up at Fenway Park. Those 52 games are now sold out, except for single seats or seats with obstructed views.

The Red Sox will sell tickets to the remaining 29 home games late next month or early in February, and they'll work on improving an online buying experience that has left many fans frustrated.

One Internet rumor is that a few people bought many of the online tickets by cracking the Web site's source code, thus bypassing the virtual waiting room that most customers had to pass through.

The Red Sox use an online ticket sales company called tickets.com that Bumgarner called "the best-in-breed in the business of these providers." Tickets.com has conducted an investigation of these rumors, and determined that it would not be possible to bypass the virtual waiting room by reading the source code.

"They're telling us it would not be possible" to bypass the system in this way, Bumgarner said. It is possible that there were some shenanigans surrounding the online sale. "We are certainly not ruling it out and are aggressively trying to identify" a scam if there was one, he said.

The Red Sox set a limit on how many tickets one person could buy, and they're now trying to identify people who bought their limit, then re-registered and bought more. Those people will receive only their limit, and the rest of their purchases will be returned for resale. "We are trying to figure out who purchased more tickets than they should have," Bumgarner said.

The Red Sox are also scanning Web sites, such as eBay, to identify people who are selling tickets they bought in last weekend's sale. The team will cancel those accounts. "They're not going to get those tickets in their hands to sell," Bumgarner said. "We've already identified over 700 accounts from scalpers" representing about 5,000 tickets that will be returned to the pool for resale.

Boston charges more for its tickets than any other major league team, but neither the price nor winning the World Series after many near misses has dampened the market.

"It is our feeling that [the world championship] has even generated more interest and has raised the expectations even higher," Bumgarner said. "As we can see from our very first sale, the interest is greater than ever.

"A lot of the casual fans who were content to watch the games on television now want to get out here and taste and feel the actual experience in person."

TICKETS RANGE from $12 for a seat in the upper bleachers to $120 for a front-row seat on the Green Monster during high-demand games.

Fenway Park has the smallest seating capacity of major league stadiums, with seating for 36,200 fans at night and 35,880 during the day, when a portion of the center-field bleachers is closed to provide a better backdrop against which batters can see the ball.

Last season, the Red Sox sold out all of their 81 home games plus their playoff and World Series games; Bumgarner said they could have sold every available ticket last weekend.

By limiting the number of games and tickets a fan can buy, the Sox are putting tickets into the hands of more people, a strategy aimed at long-term marketing versus short-term sales.

"We're trying to spread the market across as many people as possible," he said. That way if they have a down year they will still have a stable of loyal fans who have attended Fenway Park, enjoyed the experience, and will still come to the ballpark.

"We do think there's things we can do better," Bumgarner said. For example, the Red Sox may switch their online sales to a lottery-type system for the most popular opponents of their remaining games.

For these games, fans could log in, register to buy, then log out without waiting. A random drawing would determine whether their registration won the right to buy seats, and they would be notified by e-mail.

The Red Sox may adopt a lottery system for some of their remaining 29 home games, but those seats won't go on sale until next month or February -- so prospective buyers will have to wait, once again, till next year.