My Sick Mind

I love the e-mail. Opening it means I'll get anything from an offer from a foreign potentate to help him secure his bank deposit to drugs to make my penis bigger. I don't need either, so it was nice to receive one that I could actually make some use of. This came from the Baltimore Orioles - the opposite of the New York Mets - asking me to start voting online for this year's All-Star game. They weren't asking for much, and were giving so much. Vote for your favorite Orioles for the 2009 MLB All-Star Game on orioles.com today. If you select the Orioles as your "favorite" or "other favorite" Club the maximum 25 times between Wed., April 22 and Thursday, July 2, you'll receive an exclusive promo code good for one (1) FREE Upper Reserve seat to one (1) Orioles non-prime home game after the All-Star break of your choice. I don't know why the 1 has to be in parenthesis - twice. As you may know, the Orioles are my "other favorite team" s...

Leave it to Major League baseball to take batting practice and turn it into a sporting event. Not only a sporting event, but one that they make people pay to see and one that they put on ESPN, featuring frogmouth Chris Berman, who demonstrates why the people in charge of The Masters golf tournament don't want him in the same county. Tickets to this prime event were $150 each. There were still dozens of tickets available on Ebay an hour after the event. It's hard to believe that people weren't willing to pay a premium to attend batting practice. It was on TV for a lot less than 150 bucks. It isn't that it's not entertaining, because in a strange way it is. It's that it is a spectacle with tickets and a big premium cable channel involved. The other thing that's odd is that they call it "Home Run Derby," but it's more like T-ball for grown up's. Batting practice pitchers lay in fat straight balls and hitters swing from their heels. Berma...

Baseball's annual exhibition game, the All-Star game is next week. Today, I received an e-mail from Major League Baseball with a link to buy tickets to the game. Well, I was born during the day, but it wasn't yesterday . I figured there was a ruse afoot. Sure enough, clicking the link set me up with the "Official Fan to Fan Ticket Marketplace" (i.e. Legal ticket scalper) StubHub. The oddly named ticket re-seller. If I wanted a ticket stub, I wouldn't buy one from a scalper. Those, I can pick up off the floor. Being the curious guy that I am, I clicked it . Prices ranged from a low of $365 to a high of (sitting down?) $29,500. That's right. And it wasn't just one guy, there were 19 sellers asking at least $10,000 for a seat to the game. I'll leave it to you to digest those figures. What galls me about the whole StubHub scam is that the professional leagues (the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) along with the King of ticket scammers, Ticketmaster (Ticketbastar...