I usually don’t comment on sports, but this struck me. A friend coordinated a purchase among several guys of season tickets to the Nationals, DC new major league baseball team. I was mildly surprised, since my friend was one of the earliest to sign up for them, that our tickets weren’t a little better. Then this article appears in The Washington Post. Apparently, I’m not alone.
No sooner had the Washington Nationals begun sending out invoices and seat locations to fans who put deposits on 17,830 season tickets, than scores of phone calls started coming in from people dissatisfied with their locations.
“There were phone calls we had to field from people who had requested diamond box or infield boxes, but had to be pushed back farther from the field because we didn’t have enough seats,” said Kevin Uhlich, who works in the office of Nationals President Tony Tavares. “It wasn’t a mix-up or a misfire. It was purely a case of supply and demand.”
But knowledgeable sources said up to 1,000 of the seats closest to the field went to government, corporate and other VIPs throughout the region.
“This is Washington, D.C., and I had to take care of certain people,” said Tavares. “Of course VIPs were taken care of, as they are in any other circumstance. But this is as fair a process as you will find anywhere in baseball.”
I guess what rubs me raw is that the Nationals, first apparently lied about why ticket holders were unhappy and then, once confronted with the fact that 1,000 tickets were withheld, said this was “as fair a process as you will find anywhere in baseball.”
This sense of entitlement and privilege comes, I guess, with the territory, if that territory is DC, or for that matter, anywhere in this land of equality. Equality is really a fraud in so many ways.