When Opportunity Doesn’t So Much Knock

 On the list of benefits for being a season-ticket holder for the Lehigh Valley IronPigs is the opportunity to purchase single-game Phillies tickets before they go on sale to the public.  The “opportunity” came to fruition today (Monday).  It started at 10AM and finished at 10PM.  The email notifying me of the “opportunity” was time-stamped 9:36AM.  It’s great that I got 24 minutes notice to get a jump on those seats.   <–Sarcasm

Here are the problems:

1. The seats that are available are horrible.  I know that this is because the Phils are winning and are popular, so in the past I’ve kind of let this slide a bit.  Many of the best seats go to the large number of season ticket holders.  I get that.
2. Three-packs of tickets have been available to twitter followers for a week now.  That’s me, too.  So I checked that out.  Sure enough, yucky seats as well.
3. It’s not really such an opportunity:  Single game tickets were available today to ALL Phillies Twitter followers.  And all the people who follow those people.  And all the people who had the link forwarded to them, and…  Well, the Phillies said THAT was exclusive, as well.  Not so much.

Assigning the blame:

OK, I know this isn’t an IronPigs problem.  If this were a real opportunity, it might allow the IronPigs to sell more season ticket packages, and why wouldn’t they want that?  Nope, this is a Phillies problem. 

Solutions (I’m not going to complain without providing ideas for solutions, so here goes):

1. IronPigs management should encourage the Phillies to make this more of an exclusive opportunity, and not have them running the same darn promotion at the same time from Twitter and Facebook.  And, not having it happen a full week after every baseball fan in the tri-state area snapped up 3-packs.
2. Another possible fix would be for the Phils to offer up a semi-prime “group block” in a slightly better seating location for several games, and have the tickets available to IronPigs, Reading, and Lakewood at the same time, first come, first served prior to the twitter sale.  Any extras could then be released to the social media; it’s not like they won’t sell.
3. If the Phillies are not amenable to improving this perk for season ticket holders of their minor league affiliates, perhaps IronPigs management should remove this from the list of benefits.  It’s hard for me to see how this is much of a “benefit” to anyone, so it feels more like we’re missing out on something.  Perhaps just spring it on us (s/t holders) as a surprise perk rather than an included “benefit.”

One more thing:

Pre-sale opportunity will happen soon for individual game IronPigs tickets in advance of Pig Day, March 3, when they go on sale to the general public.  I usually use this to buy groups of tickets in order to host a mini-group of friends and family at field level.  I have found in the past that the availability is pretty poor here, too.  I like to try to get decent seats for them, dugout to dugout 106-118.   I suspect that there are seats that are being “held back” either for the public sale or for later release or some other reason.  I hope this isn’t the case.  If there are season ticket holders who want to pony up for EVEN MORE seats before we even have “unused” credits to cash in, then we should be allowed to purchase anything that’s not already sold.