Rockies Rebound After Virtual Pummeling

Rockies Rebound After Virtual Pummeling
By Matt Richtel

Tags: Baseball, Electronic Commerce

The lean air of high-altitude Denver is known for yielding baseball players a lot of hits. Nothing like the Colorado Rockies experience on Monday.
The team put its allotment of World Series tickets on sale at its Web site and was promptly overwhelmed with millions of hits. Two and a half hours after the site went up, it crashed, leaving ticket-hungry fans almost as forlorn as the Cleveland Indians faithful.
With the site still off line Tuesday, the team went for help to the proverbial bullpen. It called in Major League Baseball, which worked with the team, its ticket vendor, Paciolan, the software maker Oracle and other companies to fix and fortify the system.
The 52,000 tickets went on sale again today at 3 p.m. eastern and were gone in a couple of hours.
What went wrong? Bob Bowman, chief executive officer of MLB.com, said the system was initially overwhelmed by unscrupulous types who were using automated programs to get ahead in the virtual ticket line or to buy more than the four-ticket allotment allowed.
What changed? Mr. Bowman said that the team took two main steps: it improved the system to toss out automated requests, and it doubled to 20 the number of servers designated to process ticket requests and payments.
“Better planning would have solved this,” Mr. Bowman said, summing up what he said is the lesson of the crash.
The other lesson is how the forces of supply and demand are made far stronger and spread around the world by the Internet. The resale value of World Series tickets is near $1,000 for the least expensive tickets, and more than $5,000 for choice seats. That creates real incentives for people to get into the system, whatever the means – and wherever they are located.
Major League Baseball teams, which once frowned on scalping, now are active participants in a secondary market through sites like Stubhub. It’s a market that is driving at least some of the millions of hits that cost the Rockies the first loss of the World Series.





http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/rockies-rebound-after-virtual-pummeling/