A Bit More Baseball Commentary

I had finally settled down about how miserable it was at the ballgame last night, and was happy not to have to go there tonight. Then I read something on the Phillies site that got me all riled up again. It's a quote from Bob duPuy (doo-PAY), MLB's president and CEO, talking about how well the Phillies (and by proxy, MLB) handled dealing with ticket policies:

On Tuesday, DuPuy said fans were given ample notification on Monday night to retain their tickets in case of a rainout or suspension. Traditionally, stubs are needed to obtain tickets to another game during the regular season.

"Our tickets say that," DuPuy said. "The club announced it. They announced it as soon as we went into the delay. It went up on the board and they announced it again when the game was suspended. I think the club handled it very well, and I hope that the fans did in fact hold their tickets.

So let's say I'll stipulate that all baseball tickets say that the ticket is to be used in case of a rainout and I'll note that I did keep my ticket. But there was NO announcement of any type at any time regarding the delay, only an announcement when they suspended the game. In fact, my biggest frustration (aside from the obvious actual baseball-related one) was that nobody had any information. It's nice they put it on the board, but if you're in the concourse to get out of the rain, which is where most of the people were, you can't see the board, especially when it's so crowded. We actually left as soon as we saw the radar weather on TV, so we never heard anything.

There are monitors all over the park. None had any useful information of any kind. Most just had a note to FOX affiliates to run their own programming. Fortunately, I'm a partial season ticket holder, so I got an e-mail telling me what the procedures were, but that was after I was already home. It was very poorly handled and I don't think they oughta be patting themselves on the back.