Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Time for simple math with simple estimates...

[Well I was going to do a neat writeup on Mario Mendoza (for whome this blog is named after) but that'll have to wait a day.]

So a Colorado Rockies spokesman said that the Wild-Card game against the Padres sold about 500 tickets/minute, which means (based on about 15000-20000 season ticket holders, which leaves 30000-35000 tickets available) the game sold out in just over an hour.

Now, based on how the MLB handles World Series games and based on World Series ticket sales for recent teams we can just about estimate how quickly tickets will go for the Rockies(assuming the Rockies' website doesn't crash like the Giants' did in 2002).
Based on the above Giants article (saying 14k tickets were available) and based on the 30000 season ticket holders (out of 41k capacity) the Giants had that year, we can estimate that around 15000 total tickets (5k per game) were reserved for the MLB.
Now if we use the same estimates for tickets reserved for MLB (around 15k) and the estimates of current season ticket holders (15k-20k) and the fact that Coors has just a smidge over 50k capacity we get anywhere from 70k-90k total tickets available for the 3 games.

Here's the huge variable: how much more demand is there for World Series tickets than for the wild-card game?
If you assume 50-times the demand than the Wild-Card (25k tickets/minute) then the World Series will be sold out in at least 2.5-3.5 minutes.
If you assume 10-times the demand (5k tickets/minute) then it'll be sold out in 14-18 minutes.
(Note: The White Sox sold out of tickets online in 18 minutes in 2005).
Mendoza's 5280

[Update: One intangible item I forgot to include, which may increase these estimates by a tiny bit, is that the Wild Card game had no ticket limits whereas right now there is a 4-ticket limit on World Series tickets.]

[Updated Update: Apparently the Rockies either have a ton more season ticket holders than thought or their being forced to give a ton more tickets to MLB this year; either way some spokesperson said they estimate 17k-18k tickets are available per game (51k-54k available altogether) which drastically cuts the times till they sellout down to 2-10 minutes.
Also, all these assumptions were based on the Wild Card game which didn't have this weeklong wait and didn't have an exact time at which point millions (?) of people would try to buy at once; getting these World Series tickets of course will come down to clicking at the exact right moment and just being one of the lucky few.]

3 comments:

Howard said...

Good thing nobody reads this blog (yet), because your post would have made it that much tougher for us to get OUR tickets! Hahaha!

Howard said...

Maybe the season ticket holders had first option to buy up to four tickets? If so, that could eat up most of the seats right off the top.

Mendoza's 5280 said...

I think season ticket holders were allotted the number of individual season tickets they originally owned (4 season tickets = 4 WS tickets). Otherwise you could have a guy who only owns 1 season ticket (1 WS ticket per game) easily buy up to 4 more and sell them on stubhub or craigslist and make back what he spent on the season tickets at the start of the season.
I still suspect that the Rockies were strong-armed by MLB into giving up a larger-than-normal chunk of tickets (wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them popped up on stubhub since stubhub is the only 'outside' ticket broker MLB is 'partnered' with.