Waiting for Godot, along with World Series tickets in Denver - ESPN

Source: ESPN
By: John Helyar

The Colorado Rockies clearly are better at hardball than software. The team ran into major snafus with its online sales of World Series tickets before it finally achieved a sellout Tuesday afternoon of Games 3, 4 and 5 in Denver.

The club cited an "external, malicious attack" for Monday's halt in sales. In reality, it was just aggressive ticket brokers doing business as usual.

The brokers' sophisticated programs, called "bots," made all-out assaults on the nearly 60,000 available tickets. The company which runs computer operations for the Rockies ticket office was swamped by 8.5 million hits over the course of 90 minutes.

A team from Major League Baseball Advanced Media worked overnight with techs from the automated ticketing company Paciolan to shore up defenses. They reconfigured the system to block out the ISP addresses of the "bad guys." They opened the spigots to accommodate more traffic. And after the online ticket office reopened on Tuesday at noon MT, the Rockies' three games sold out in 2?hours.

For the many fans who spent hours clicking their mouse and gritting their teeth and still were shut out of the Series, it was about as frustrating as watching Mike Hampton try to justify his Rockies contract back in the bad old days.

"You get so excited that the team has gotten to this point, then to go through this-it leaves a bad taste in your mouth," said Molly Dougan of Colorado Springs, whose only reward for the investment of hours in this exercise was her computer's infuriating message: "Thank you for your patience."

Get used to it, Molly. You have seen the future, and it isn't those straggly lines of ticket-seekers snaking around the ballpark. It's the brave new world of online.

"We're in the middle of a major convergence of technology and selling tickets," said Robert Tuchman, president of TSE Sports & Entertainment, which sells travel and ticket packages to sports events. "But there are still kinks in the system."

The Rockies handled their virtual box office differently than MLB's other "final four" teams did. The Red Sox, Indians and Diamondbacks set up online registries, where fans could request Series tickets. The teams then held drawings to randomly select the lucky buyers.

In Boston, there apparently were no significant complaints or technical problems, at least in comparison. Though there were plenty of fans in the request queue -- a reported 350,000 or so, seeking two tickets for one Series game -- there was time enough to have an orderly drawing. The lottery winners were notified by e-mail on Oct. 12.