EVERYTHING attached to ticket sales in this town now seems predicated on learning how much people can take before they can’t take any more.
F’rinstance, Tim Castor of Merrick, L.I., has been a Met ticket subscriber since the early 1980s. The last 10 years he has purchased the Sunday package, 13 games per season. With Sundays off, he and his wife prefer day games. Tickets they couldn’t use they’d sell or give away.
Over the last few seasons, however, things began to change. In a reverse and almost perverse ritual, Castor every preseason would sort through the tickets to identify those likely to be the most attractive games. He’d place those in the “Out” box – games he could reasonably anticipate would be moved to 8:05 p.m. for ESPN.
After all, arriving home from Sunday games well after midnight on a work night is a privilege Castor would first grant to Bud Selig.
Meanwhile, he’d keep for himself the tickets to the least attractive draws – Pirates, Nationals, Marlins – knowing those would remain afternoon games.
And now it grows sicker. This coming season the Mets’ “15-Game Sunday Plan” includes only 10 tickets to Sunday games and five must-buy tickets to weeknight games.
Thus, not only does Castor anticipate that at least three of the Sunday games will be moved to 8:15 for TV money, the Mets’ “Sunday Plan” has become part of a scheme designed to force his purchase of weeknight tickets that he doesn’t want and the Mets would otherwise have difficulty selling.
Yes, I know, no one has a gun to anyone’s head; no one’s forcing Tim Castor to do anything. Except, after 25 years of steady patronage, he’s now annually forced to choose whether to keep paying more to get less, whether to allow the Mets and MLB to make him into a bigger sucker.
But in this town you can be a Met fan, a Jet fan a Yankee fan, a Knick fan, a Giant fan or a Celine Dion Fan, and that’s the choice you’re left with.
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Please, no more calls or e-mails from assistant district attorneys, prosecutors and defense attorneys (past and current) who want this column’s readers to know that Mike Francesa, despite his imperious declarations and rude treatment of callers who might know better, has no idea what he’s blowing hard about vis-a-vis the law and the prosecution of Plaxico Burress and/or Antonio Pierce.
As readers have long known, that’s Res ipsa loquitur – Latin legalese for “speaks for itself” and “self-evident,” or, in Francesa’s case, “What else is new?”
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What you and I would have fixed in 20 (mostly angry) minutes, ESPN hasn’t fixed in 20 years.
Golf highlights, those chosen so that viewers can see the ball going in or near the cup, become farcical as the ball disappears behind graphics.
“SportsCenter’s Top 10 Fantastic Finishes of 2008,” Wednesday, included the first half of a Tiger Woods putt in the U.S. Open. The ball eventually vanished behind a graphic.
It fully figures that the only putt ESPN can be relied upon to show, start to finish, is the one Chris Berman made in a Pro-Am.
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Saturday’s Oregon-Oregon St. gave the Versus Network its largest football audience. Sure, it was a big game. Yet know-better TV execs line up to throw millions of dollars a year at John Madden.
That malodorous get-rich-quick day-trading stocks infomercial starring Fox’s Jimmy Johnson, seems to have, whoosh, left TV. Makes one wonder if someone blew a whistle. . . . 1050 ESPN, with extensive live coverage of post-Burress shooting news, continues to leave WFAN for dead in such local breaking matters.
The Army-Navy game tomorrow at noon on CBS always stirs rich memories. Two years ago, for example, Chris “Lost Dog” Russo (remember him?) went out of his way to ridicule the game as worthless, as “the kind that doesn’t do anything for me.” Golly, I miss him.
“Steppin’ Out Radio,” a syndicated show devoted to discussion of addictions and recovery, has a new host and new local home. Channel 7 sports anchor Scott Clark, long an activist on behalf of alcoholism treatment and prevention, is the host, 1050-ESPN (late Saturday nights midnight-2 a.m.) is the place.
Not even ESPN analyst Emmitt Smith, who rubber-stamps almost everything spoken by the last speaker, could indulge Stuart Scott’s baloney Monday after Scott said the Colts have won five straight and “are now playing like the Colts that we know.”
Smith told Scott what many to most watching knew – that the day before the Colts, who’d beaten the Browns, 10-6, “didn’t even score an offensive touchdown.”