Blatant rip-offery

So the other day I started buying my CACTUS LEAGUE SPRING TRAINING 2006 tickets and discovered that fucking MLB is engaging in some serious gougery. I reluctantly paid the $3-ish per ticket "service charge", but now they charge another $3.50 for USPS mailing? Again, I KINDA get it... however, I noticed that THEY WOULD STILL CHARGE YOU A FEE IF YOU JUST WALK UP TO THE WILL-CALL WINDOW YOURSELF!!!

So the only POSSIBLE way to not pay all these crap charges is to pre-fly out to AZ or whatever and buy them at the box office. Okay.

I sense that you're disgusted. It gets somewhat better.

When I went to buy Padres tickets, I noticed that in order to get them online, you have to go through Ticketmaster. And you know how I feel about Ticketmaster. So I didn't buy them, but I drove everyone I know batshit by asking them what THEY would do in my shoes. Would they just buy the tickets and get the nice seats ahead of time and not worry about it, or would they say 'NO, TICKETMASTER, YOU ARE NOT GETTING MY MONEY!!!' and buy the tickets when they got to AZ?

I called the box office over there in Peoria, AZ and the woman said that the game I was interested in was kind of a high attendance matchup and while she'd never known a game to sell out, I might be stuck with bad seats.

I came pretty close to just saying, screw it, and giving big bad Ticketmaster my bidness. But then I had an idea... I posted a little ad on craigslist.com asking for a volunteer to buy the tickets for me. Long shot, right? I mean, what the hell could be in it for them?

Ladies and gents, I got 4 responses from people who were willing to work something out. The most promising e-mail came from a man in Phoenix who said he'd do it, but that he'd like some authentic Harvard gear in exchange.

So that's what I'm doing. I'll be mailing out the Harvard gear and the dude in Arizona will be buying my tickets. Smash the state! And eff you, Ticketmaster!