Totally awesome. Say your team is in the World Series for the first time ever. Say the World effin' Series is coming to your town for the first time ever. What the one thing you can't do?
That's right, fuck it up.
And that is just what happened, boys & girls. I suppose you could say the Rockies were trying to fight the power by not going with TicketMaster to distribute their tickets.
Locally, the Rockies are the only pro team that isn't a Ticketmaster client. It picked Paciolan in 1998, primarily because the team wanted control over its own inventory, said Kevin Fenton, the team's senior director of ticket operations.
The Rockies' previous provider, Destinet, went bankrupt and left the Rockies in the dark for six months.
(Or maybe that's a history of bad decision-making?)
I suppose you could say they were trying to make the ticket sale more "fair" by doing online sales only. (Or at least they did.)
All I can say is that the end result of Paciolan's entire evenue.net service crashing utterly under the strain of 8.5 million hits in 90 minutes is nothing if not completely obvious.
You see, online-only sales are "fair" to everyone, so anyone who saw that it snowed in Denver yesterday is thinking "Sweet! World Series + ski trip!!" and trying to log on to get some seats. If you are a team like the Rockies, who have been in the dumps for so long nobody knows WTF is happening right now, you need to sell some season tickets with this miracle run. You NEED to get some local fans in those seats for a World Series game. Next in line, you should get some Red Sox fans on board, because they are everywhere and love them some baseball. After that comes the tourists.
Screw being fair! You need to take care of that guy (I personally know a few) that comes to as many Rockies games as he can and always has a hell of a time. The people that showed up at Coors Field today, with a vague threat of riot int he air? Those are your people. Take care of your people and they might forget that the team is winning in spite of a front office that could seemingly care less.
Update: As of about 7pm Mountain, they still have no answer. Also this here site comes up #1 for "fuck Paciolan". How cool is that? Granted, it's pure coincidence, since I never typed that phrase until now, but whatever. If the shoe fits... ---
Track o' the post: All The Old Showstoppers from The New Pornographers' latest, Challengers for this lyric:
When we hit the numbers we broke Broken and changed 'em Changed as we spoke