Friday, May 28, 2010

Complaints about Strasburg Scheduling

I guess people are annoyed that the front office hasn't announced when Strasburg's first start is. Seems pretty silly to me.

I mean, first of all, you'd think none of these people had ever heard of a scalper before. Go to any game, anywhere in America, and you'll see plenty of dudes selling tickets out front. That'll be especially true for Strasburg's first start.

Second, I go to a lot of Nationals games, and you can pretty much always get tickets wherever you want. And although I'm sure there will be some lasting attendance bump for Strasburg starts, by July there will be unsold seats close enough to hear the hitters cursing to themselves.

And finally, people need to remember that teams never schedule starts more than a week in advance. One rainout and you might have to re-set your rotation.

3 comments:

Joe Drugan said...

Steven, I'm glad you said this. I think people are blaming the organization because they got overzealous after media reports. Well said.

Will said...

It's beyond silly. It's absurd. They bought tickets to see their favorite team. A team they are so dedicated to that they created a blog about them. Then when the game they speculated (speculation always involves risk) would be the game was not, they were upset that they were somehow tricked into seeing their favorite team... What?

It's not like if Strasburg doesn't pitch, the tickets are invalid. Or they were only allowed one chance to buy tickets. Or the actual game Strasburg will pitch has since sold out.

They need to reserve their outrage for real problems, and there are plenty of them to go around.

Steven said...

I'm one of the people who was "wronged" (Really, the only damage was I paid for seats I ordinarily would not have purchased (my preferred seats were sold out when I purchased the tickets)). Some think that this was a ploy to get a sellout of an otherwise unremarkable Reds game. I don't think that's the case, but if the Nats knew for a long time that June 4th was not going to be the date (and so far the only source of that is Bill Ladson), I think as a service to the fans they should have dispelled the rumor.

Though there might be some legitimate grievance (though I havn't seen any anger about) with the media who kept mentioning the date with very little hedging (this blog not being among them). Then those sources saying "well that Nationals never said..." after the fact without taking any responsibility.