More than 6,300 Tickets Available At Fenway Park For Opening Day

Red Sox fans were quick to criticize Yankees fans last year who kept out of Yankee Stadium early in the season due to high prices in the Legends Seats, but those Red Sox fans should be pointing the fingers at themselves. After having trouble selling out the American League Division series last season, the Red Sox still have over 6,300 seats available left for Opening Day this year according to today's Boston Herald (picture to the right from the article). And Sox fans can't blame this one on the Red Sox virtual waiting room (AKA as The Eighth Circle of Hell). This is just a case of fans not wanting to pay the price to see their team.

It's not like the Red Sox are playing the Orioles or the Blue Jays. Or that it's a Tuesday in mid-April. This is Opening Day on a Sunday. According to the Red Sox website the seating capacity for night games is 37,402. That means that 17% of the park still isn't sold two weeks before the game. And those tickets that are being sold are down about 30% for last year's opening day when the opponent was Tampa Bay. Yankees fans, it's a buyers market and a great chance to invade Fenway Park on Opening Day for the depending World Series champion, New York Yankees.

And the Red Sox don't seem to think that anything is wrong: "Ron Bumgarner, the Red Sox ticketing senior vice president, had a more positive pitch, saying the team is experiencing 'incredibly high demand' for Opening Day and the season...'I’m surprised that anyone would think sales are off.'” Um, Ron, I think we have plenty of statistics to support that notion.

The comments on the article showed that Red Sox fans weren't feeling too sorry for anyone. Check out some of the bitterness being spewed from "Red Sox Nation":

ViewFromTheTop: "WHY SHOULD WE BUY SOX TICKETS? MANAGEMENT ISN'T TRYING TO BUILD THE BEST TEAM. THEY'RE INTO BARGAIN-BASEMENT PLAYERS. THEY FEEL THEY WON 2 WORLD SERIES, THAT'S ENOUGH. WE WON'T EVEN RECOGNIZE THE TEAM THIS YEAR. I USUALLY AM ALL PSYCHED TO WATCH THE GAMES, THIS SEASON, I DON'T EVEN CARE."

Massinator: "Good. Maybe the Sox are no longer trendy and all the bandwagon pink hats will free up some seats for the old geezers with their scorecards and transistor radios. There are some things about the old days that I miss. Those old geezers, the smell of cigar smoke, cheap seats, the sense that the place was a little dangerous.....Now it's like the Burlington Mall. The price of success, I guess."

nashuadan: "Oh no, looks like the ridiculous prices are even too much for the hipsters and social butterflies that have infested Fenway for the last decade. The smart fans and families stopped going to Fenway a long time ago. I'd rather drink my cheap beers at home and watch game on a flatscreen than go to that dump of a ballpark. Or better yet, travel to an away stadium where everything is half the price."

toms616: "small crummy seats, overpriced tickets,grubby bathrooms, high priced parking, high food and drink prices...no power papi, sit out every 4th game drew, throw 115 pitches in 4 innings dice-k, only have 1 pitch delcarmen straight and hard down the middle.... Larry the lizard spewing his bullcrap about all the renovations to the grand old dame ballpark....Theo's spin on defense and pitching when he couldnt get a big bat"

Those are just some of the angry fan comments on the article. The article was a little misleading, though, as the tickets references were actually secondary market tickets and the real shock of the article should not have been the amount of tickets currently being scalped, but how much the Red Sox are in bed with Ace Tickets. Of course, they aren't the only team with this type of arrangement with a secondhand seller (the Red Sox, Yankees and the rest of Major League Baseball has a very fuzzy and seemingly unethical relationship with Stubhub), but this one seems to be particularly egregious with a special team partnership fostered between the team and the group. Regardless of how you look at it, this is not looking good for the Red Sox or their fans and Yankees fans should flood Fenway Park in droves in two weeks for Opening Night.