Two Tickets to Paradise?

A great deal of buzz has been going around this week about the Florida Marlins selling tickets to Roy Halladay's perfect game, which took place last Saturday evening, May 29. You're reading that right - the Marlins, one of only three organizations with multiple World Series championships in the post-1993 Wild Card era, are selling tickets to a game that not only already took place, but featured their team fail to put a single runner on base. Not only are the tickets selling fairly well, but this is not even an unprecedented move. OK, I get it. You buy a previously-unsold ticket to a perfect game for face value, hang onto it for a few years, keep it in good condition, maybe even frame it. Then one day you hope to be able to toss that bad boy up on eBay and sit with your feet up as the bids roll in for such a vaunted piece of memorabilia.

Normally you'd expect me to blast the Florida organization for chasing dollars this way and essentially giving a big F-you to the 25 men who wore a Marlins uniform that night. But oddly enough I'll give the Marlins a pass on this one. Take the revenue where you can get it. I see it more as a passive-aggressive jab by the Marlin organization at their relatively disinterested fan base for coming out to the ballpark in putridly small amounts despite the team being consistently respectable and competitive. It's like they're saying, "ok, all you South Floridians, maybe if you guys did a bit better job of showing up to our games and acting like you really cared about the team, you'd have the right to be miffed at the fact that we are somewhat celebrating a game in which we were dominated. But until then, we don't want to hear it." I'll stop short of saying I applaud the Marlins for doing this. Let's just say I "golf-clap" them for doing it.

But of course, if I didn't have anyone to chide, I wouldn't be writing this. I've got to tweak the few thousand people who actually went online and bought these after-the-fact tickets. Like I said before, I get what your reasoning is - you want that little piece of baseball history and the prospect of selling it at a profit in the future. But do you have no personal pride or sense of what is genuine? Are you really going to anxiously await for your prized May 29 Phillies/Marlins tickets to arrive and then cherish them as if you were actually at the game? Are you going to display the ticket(s) prominently somewhere and pass stories down through the generations about the view from your seat that night, at what point you realized the perfecto was in reach, how nervous you were not to jinx anything, or the lump that went in your throat before Shane Victorino tracked down that monster fly ball to center for the first out of the 9th inning? No, my friend, you are not going to do any of that.

If you bought a ticket to that game after it took place, please look yourself in the mirror. You are now on the level of the guy who buys a $1,000 driver to try to make up for the fact that his golf swing stinks, or the guy who uses his buddy's dog or toddler son to try to pick up women, or Charlie Sheen one night in 1996 when he bought up all the left field lower deck seats at an Angels game in a fruitless effort to get himself a home run ball. Stop trying to cheapen and dilute the experience of the 25,086 who were indeed present at Sun Life Stadium that night. Money can't buy life experiences. That's what makes them so valuable! Yes, I'm certain I read that somewhere.