As we continue to expand our content here at Over the Monster, one goal is to make the site a fun place for discussion on the weekend. So in addition to Saturday morning recaps, I'm going to be writing short posts with the goal of getting a conversation started. Once the season gets going, they'll probably be up a few hours before game time, to get everyone in a baseball mood. I'll be writing the pieces, but mostly it'll be about you folks and where you want to take the discussion. So if something happens during a given week that you think the community should talk about, send me an email or a tweet, and I'll take a look.
Odds are pretty good that everyone (myself included) spent a couple hours yesterday watching the Red Sox "virtual waiting room" reload. Because we are nutcases. And because that simulated ticket line graphic was oddly mesmerizing. Regardless, the smell of Red Sox tickets is in the air. Of course, with ticket sales come ticket policies, and this new one you may not have noticed.
Short form: upper bleacher seats, the most affordable actual seats in the park, for high-demand games (basically Yankee games plus a few interleague matchups), will be digital-only. If you want to get into the park with those tickets, you'll need the credit card that was used to buy them. On the one hand, this means they're almost impossible to scalp, so you won't wind up on the corner of Brookline and Landsdowne paying some guy named Fitzy $60 for a seat in Row ZZZ. On the other, it means you can't give your tickets to anyone, either as a gift or because something came up and you have to skip the game.
What do we think, commenters of OTM? Is this actually going to discourage scalpers? Why start with the cheap seats? Is this simply one more hurdle in the already-tricky process of buying tickets to see the team we love? Chat it up.