Word: ticket
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first Saturday of the Series, the melting pot had been replaced by a fine souffle. The crowd was mostly adult, almost all white, and wealthy. They walked self-consciously into Fenway, nervously ignoring the ticket less Sox fans who hovered resentfully about the gates. Across the street from the park a large tent enclosed a pregame luncheon party; policemen guarded its entrance, allowing the uninvited only a glimpse of white tableclothes and yellow flowers. Inside the tent a dance orchestra played...
...COURSE, THERE were some real fans at Fenway, and even the dignified neophytes grew noisier as the game wore on. But it wasn't a baseball crowd, and it certainly wasn't a Fenway crowd. Why not? Where were the hippies, the highschool kids, the experienced bleacher-sitters? Tickets had been expensive, it's true--$10 for grandstand, $15 for upper box--and fifty or a hundred bucks is a lot of money to spend on one family baseball outing. But this was the World Series; diehard fans should have been willing to pay extra, to go to the bank...
...turns out that many did, but it didn't do most of them any good. Thousands of ticket orders, even those postmarked in the wee hours of the first day, had come back unfilled. For relatively few of the World Series tickets were sold to the general public at random, competitive basis. Instead, the front office dispensed its favors through a largely covert system of political and corporate patronage...
...World Series by far the largest bloc of those went to Boston corporations; the Gillette Company, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, and three banks--the First National Bank of Boston, the National Shawmut Bank and the State Street Bank and Trust Company. Each had held thousands of season tickets for the entertainment of favored customers and friends, and the Red Sox front office had offered two Series tickets for every season ticket each company owned. Season ticket holders (including some individuals) collected roughly 20,000 of Fenway's 35,000 seats...
...exact figures are hard to come by, the general trend is nonetheless apparent. My cousin's ticket came from her father's friend, a businessman who once pitched minor league ball and now throws batting practice for the Red Sox before gametime. Almost everyone at the first game of the Series had some similar story of at least vague ties to VIP's. A friend of mine got his ticket from a friend of his who had an acquaintance in the Fly Club, to which several tickets had been donated by an Fly alumnus who had once owned part...