The hottest ticket in town is not the Broncos, who are middling at 3-3 and completely uninteresting, but the baseball team, which has hoisted the city on its shoulders and taken it on a near-month-long ride that's completely unprecedented in the 100-plus-year history of the sport. No wonder Rangers Fan insists the Rockies are "the greatest story in baseball history."
How hot are those tickets pictured above? Well, those who logged onto the team's website today found out. After enduring hours of failed attempts, ticket buyers were met with this message:
This morning the Rockies' ticketing provider Paciolan experienced a system wide outage that is impacting all of their North American customers. They are working hard to resume service as soon as possible and apologize to their customers and all fans for this impact.
Why? Because apparently the website got 8.5 million hits within the first 90 minutes of the tickets going on sale. 8.5 million!
Then there's this (from the above link):
About 20 people lined up in near-freezing temperatures outside the Denver Public Library before it opened in hopes of using public-access computers to score tickets.“If you can’t get tickets here, you’re going to have to pay $200, $300 above face value,” said Clayton McLeod, a 26-year-old heavy-machine operator who took the day off to try to get seats.
McLeod said he has Internet access from his apartment building but thought the library’s computers might be faster. His mother, father, uncle and girlfriend were trying to buy tickets from other computers, he said.
His boss, also a Rockies fan, agreed to give him the day off and asked McLeod to get tickets for him, too.
This bears repeating: these people lined up in near-freezing weather in front of the Denver Public Library. Ha ha!
Need more proof the Rockies are hotter than the Broncos right now?
Going head-to-head against a Steelers-Broncos game at Investco Field -- that was close throughout, mind you -- a baseball game on the opposite coast captured a 14.3 rating last night in Denver (compared to 18.3 for the football game). In a football town, this is rather incredible.
But it all ultimately goes back to the tickets... 8.5 million hits is an enormous number. For some perspective: this blog, since March, has gotten about 0.2 percent of what the Rockies' site got in an hour and a half.
The good news is, virtually all the tickets for Games 3-5 are still available. I imagine the above error message was received with more joy than any error message possibly should be.
UPDATE: Some pictures for you, from the Denver Post. Only because a couple of these could be screenshots from some future Geico commercial.
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