The Streak Is Over

Sellout ends from Don Kelley on Vimeo.

The Sellout Streak is Over.
The consecutive game sellout streak at Fenway Park ended last night - to no one's surprise. Sox brass predicted it in early February when they admitted that season ticket sales were off by 10%.

It's official.
Whether you believed it or not, it's in the record books. 820 consecutive games - that includes playoffs which were obviously sellouts - that's a record in all of professional sports. They'd send season ticket holders souvenir baseballs commemorating the 500th, 600th and 700th sellouts.

So what was it like last night?
Raining. Pretty hard at times. The tarp was on the field for 43-minutes. You can see in the video that two ticket windows on Lansdowne Street were getting little or no action. On a typical night the line for the Day-of-Game tickets would stretch down the sidewalk under the Monster Seats all the way to Gate C. Not last night.

The bad news.
Joel Hanrahan imploded in the 9th, blowing a 5-3 lead and leaving us with an 8-5 loss, but I'll spout off on him in another blog.

The good news.
Opening Day always sells out, but the second home game of the season is a notoriously tough sell everywhere. Despite that, the Red Sox had 31,800 people there on a cold, rainy night. Only four teams in Major League Baseball drew more than that, and they all had gametime temperatures in the mid-70's. The Red Sox drew more than 25 other teams and had more fans last night than Kansas City, Miami and Seattle combined (and two of those even have a roof).

Ryan Dempster had a quality start (5 innings, 3 hits, only 1 earned run). Lester and Buchholz look teriffic. They're in 1st place, and after the strong start season tickets are only off by 8%. We could see a new streak start sometime in May.