It's not always about the money. It mostly is, though.
As of this writing, the Red Sox have the worst record in Major League Baseball. Pretty unimpressive considering they won The World Series at home last year.
And it was only a couple of years ago that the Red Sox ended a 794-game sellout streak, and while there are many who dispute that figure, it remains a fact that fans regularly shelled out $75-$100 to sit in a $20 bleacher seat for any game in July and August for a good number of years. Whether they were playing good or shitty did not matter. The economy was hummin' along and Boston had plenty of good-paying jobs - Business owners, Bankers, college students with rich parents, union guys...they all joined the tourists who were flush with cash. Everybody came to the newly renovated, historic Fenway Park to see the greatest team in baseball play in one of the last of the great parks. Everybody earned. The team owners, the guys in the box office... and every hustler on the street still talks about the days when you could make hundreds if you just touched a handful of tickets.
Those days are long gone. You look on StubHub right now and you'll see games in August selling for eight bucks. Disgusting. We buy 'em up and try to get $20 on the street and do that ten times. Do the math. Some guys are actually getting jobs. Fuckin' sad is what it is.
But once in awhile you get a good game and Friday was one of those games. Not like the old days, but reminiscent.
Snags called it. The first game after the Allstar break is always at least halfway descent, but this game looked good for a while and no one was paying attention. We bought some Standing Rooms a couple of weeks in advance, sold some online and kept the rest for the walk. The economy is picking up. The weather is perfect. We were optimistic but we did not expect a sell out. And while it wasn't a hundred-dollar ticket, it was a sixty-dollar hand-out and it just got better and better.
We'd already made a good chunk of cash. The game was in the second inning and there were still a hundred people waiting in line even though there were no more tickets to be had. Snags was at the top of Landsdowne street selling the last couple of seats we had. I was running around trying to "pick up" so we could flip a few more seats before it was over. I tried a bunch of my usual spots but was not having any luck, then I scored eight seats on Boylston St. for short money and was heading back to meet Snags when I bumped into a woman near Gate B who was looking for a single. There was something about her....
The window of opportunity to sell these seats was brief, but I did not want to stop talking to this chic. Her name was Jennifer and she had just finished defending her Doctoral Thesis in Neurochemistry. Her whole family had come from Kentucky to help her celebrate. She bought everyone tickets and was one short. She told them all to go inside and said she would find one and that is where I came in. I told her seventy bucks was the price. It was high, but close to the face value of the ticket. That's when she told me about her accomplishment. I know what that's like when you achieve something that took a tremendous amount of perseverance and you just want to tell the first person you see. I remember when I was learning how to ski and skied my first black diamond trail. I grabbed a guy by the shoulders at the bottom of the slope and screamed, "That was my first black diamond!" Scared the living shit out of the poor prick. Dr. Jennifer didn't grab me by the shoulders, but she lit up like fireworks when she told me. She said she felt like she deserved to be drunk for a week and I wished there was something I could say that would make her want me to spend that week with her. She was just magnetic and I knew I would never see her again. She bought the ticket, I shook her hand and congratulated her and gave her five dollars back.
"The least I can do is buy your first beer."
Then she was gone.
It was dark by the time Snags and I sold the rest of our seats, but we had our best day at Fenway in a long time. We got a couple of steakbombs from Deliworks, went back to the house and ate freezepops while binge-watching the last season of Californication.
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