But i thought, i'll just try and see if i even could get tickets. I remember hearing stories of people going crazy trying to buy world series tickets a few years ago.
Here's what the process was like. I went to tigers.com the day the tickets went on sale and saw this
I clicked on Game 1 and was directed to this screen, the Virtual Waiting Room. I have to say that this is actually a good idea. It's not first come-first serve but sort of a random selection. And it stops people from just clicking the Refresh button 5000 times.
It said that it would automatically refresh the screen. But i figured if 1 was good then 10 would be better. So i went back and clicked Open in New Tab ten times. At the top here you can see all the browser windows i had open.
I don't know if it actually helped though because all of a sudden, all of the windows went to this screen. I thought "great, it worked, i can buy tickets now." It turned out, not really.
This was the next screen. I selected 2 tickets together in the Right Field Grandstand and clicked Continue.
It then went to everyone's favorite screen, the wavy text verification. This is so that they know you are a real person and not a computer program trying to buy up all the tickets, then sell them online for triple the price. So i typed in the words and hit continue.
It went back to the previous screen with this error.
So i tried again.
Once or twice it said this.
This process went on and on for about 20 minutes and i was really sick of typing in those hard to read words. Until finally it worked. I actually had given up on the right field grandstand and just selected 2 tickets, best available. Apparently the best available were $60 in row 22 of the upper deck. After taxes and fees (which are totally made up) the total would have been $140.
The crazy thing is that there was time limits on everything. 2 minutes to pick your seats, 3 minutes to verify, 3 minutes to enter your name.
It turned out to be a good practice run if the Tigers made it to the ALCS (round 2). I was going to have to order them at 4PM in the lobby of our hotel in Rome.
It ended up that i couldn't get tickets for round 2 (ALCS) because they went on sale at 10am the day i left for Italy.
The tickets were $110 face value. Luckily with all the sports going on here in Michigan: Lions Monday night Football and MSU vs UofM.... the tigers got left behind a bit.
The day of the games the tickets were going for less than face value and Karrie bought right field bleachers (my favorite seats) for $25 each. It was game 4 and it was cold and rainy but it was great. Way better than upper deck for $250.
It started a few hours late because of the rain, then went into extra innings and the Tigers ended up losing but it was still fun.
Here's the tarp on the field before the game.
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