This year Tracy and I won the Red Sox opening day lottery giving us the opportunity to purchase opening day tickets. We were able to get second row seats in right field. So off to Boston we went for a quick 2 day trip to the game. It was really cool to be at opening day after the Red Sox won the World Series. We got to see the opening ceremony, ring presentation, banner raising, and they had the giant pennants covering the Green Monster. We got to boo Ryan Braun, and the weather wasn’t that bad either. In the 40’s but the rain held off. It definitely got cooler in the final innings. Here’s a few photos from the day.
Our second quick trip to Boston saw us atop the Coca-Cola roof deck seats, except we were standing room only. It was a really great place to see a game, except of course for the rain delay again. Grumble. This time we saw the Sox lose to the Atlanta Braves. Red Sox loses tend to happen quite frequently to us.
Saturday we spent the day at the Arnold Arboretum, which was very cool. Lots of trees, including Redwoods. We walked around a great portion of the grounds. Then back to Fenway for a night game where we got to see the gigantic American flag unfurled to celebrate our veterans service. We’ve seen the huge flag twice now, and I don’t think it is something they do all that often at Fenway. This time after a brief rain shower the game started on time, and it was a beautiful night, plus the Sox finally won!
We made a quick in and out trip to Boston this past weekend to catch 2 Red Sox games at Fenway. Last year we decided that rather than taking several trips to Boston for Red Sox games we should try and get a couple back to back games to maximize our baseball and save ourselves some driving back and forth. We got some good tickets to the Red Sox vs. Los Angeles Angels, and made the best of what turned out to be a surprisingly warm first weekend in may. First stop was the “new” Boston Garden where we visited the Boston Sports Museum. Lots of neat stuff in there, plus the employees were getting the rink ready for Wednesday night’s Semi-Conference finals game against the Philadelphia Flyers so we saw them checking out all the displays, score board, and sound the goal horn. It was really cool, and really empty.
Boston Garden
Champions
obstructed view
Monday night was the first game at Fenway Park since the anti-terrorist raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, and the Red Sox organization went all out to honor our country. We had a couple Celtics and Bruins joined by a war veteran throw out the first pitches. Had members of the military come out for a moment of silence before the game and national anthem. And, the Red Sox unfurled their huge American flag over the Green Monster, which is usually only reserved for opening/patriots day games. So that was really cool to see. Plus the Red Sox won the game! Hooray!
Fenway Flag
NESN
Tuesday we went to the Boston Museum of Art and saw a really great Chihuly glass exhibit as well as some of the ancient art from Egypt, Greece, and Rome. We enjoyed the Japanese Garden outside in the courtyard of the museum. Afterwards we went to the New England Aquarium for a while and visited the new Shark and Ray Touch Tank where we got to touch the many rays that swam by. We saw the penguins too. Afterwards it was on to fenway for our second game. The Red Sox won this game too, and we saw David Ortiz hit another home run (his third of the season was Monday, and fourth was Tuesday).
Boston
Chihuly Glass Art
Chihuly Glass Art
Chihuly Glass Art
All in all a really great, if not really quick trip.
This past weekend Tracy and I went to Philadelphia to visit her mom and brother. We also went down to Baltimore to see the Red Sox for the first time this year. The pitching match up featured John Lackey for the Sox and Brian Matusz for the Orioles. We were hoping for a high scoring affair with the Sox winning of course. We ended up getting some extra innings for our $, but the Sox came out on the losing end 3-4 in an 11 inning thriller. Still we had a great time.
Well I decided to battle the virtual waiting room for Boston Red Sox tickets. Its a battle you can’t really win with all the markups and convenience fees. But you can try to minimize the damage by getting the tickets from the red sox, instead of their official online markup dealers AceTickets. How to get the tickets? Wait in the virtual waiting room for single game tickets. Sounds pretty simple, its not. If you go to the Boston Red Sox home page to buy tickets, they will inform you that they are not on sale yet. Try to find out when they go on sale, and it will not be posted anywhere. On January 28th, it was posted on the red sox site that tickets to single season games go on sale Saturday January 30th at 10am. Wow, thanks for the 2 day heads up. Its like they are trying to hide it from the public.
Waiting Room
So what do you do, get into the virtual waiting room, and hope you get picked for tickets. I’ve tried this before. Some days I’ve been in from 10am-4pm, and still never got tickets. I’ve got tickets before too, so its a crap shoot. About 2 hours in, almost all the weekend games had “limited availability”. Around 1pm I amazingly got in! Knowing all the “good” games were sold out, I tried for bleacher (lowest cost) seats to two mid week games against the Arizona Diamondbacks in June. I was able to get bleacher seats on Tuesday, but Wednesday they were sold out and I ended up with more expensive right field seats.
My $28 bleacher seats came with a $4.25 convenience fee, and the total order has a $7 processing fee too. But how does this compare to buying the same tickets through the Official Boston Red Sox ticket resellers? Well 4 tickets in the same section go for $67 each, with around a $4.50 service charge. How is this legal? Well the anti-scalping laws are very vague:
“The statute says they can charge a reasonable mark-up,” Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said. “We can’t assess what a reasonable mark-up is … because the statute is very vague.”
So, with almost 2/3rds of the seats at Fenway reserved for season tickets, another portion allotted to Sox Packs, more tickets to Yankees games available through email lottery, there just isn’t that much choice of how to get your tickets. Here’s a link to an interesting older article on ticket sales, things haven’t changed much in 2010.
Red Sox fans squeezed by ticket resellers – SouthCoastToday.com
