Kevin Elster's brother has had enough

The genius behind the strategy of packing the Rogers Centre with Red Sox and Tigers fans has decided to take his show on the road, having had enough of Toronto and its general apathy towards baseball.

Jeff Blair reports that Patrick Elster, who has suffered through a life lived as the brother of Kevin Elster, decided to move on from the Jays as early as last December. This may explain his "fuck it, I'm outta here anyways" approach to selling tickets this year, which has resulted in a net drop of about 40,000 fans over the first 30 home dates.

Not that you can attribute all of this decline to Elster. The Jays have yet to have a really compelling opponent (i.e. Boston or the Yanks) come to town for a weekend series since the notorious opening weekend. It will be interesting to see if this weekend's matchup against the Cubs attracts many fans from across the Midwest, although given higher gas prices and the pain in the ass of getting back and forth across the border these days, the Jays won't be able to count on the visitors' fans packing the Dome.

How other teams deal with the teeming Red Sox hordes

While the Blue Jays ticketing office has gone out of their way to accommodate Red Sox fans, the Cincinnati Reds have put the screws to the Masshole diaspora.

As reported last week in the Consumerist, the Reds are forcing fans who wish to buy tickets to the Interleague series against the BoSox to buy them as part of a four-pack of games.

Some former Bostonian who wanted to buy eight tickets to each game for him and all of his douchey members of the Masshole Nation was up in arms over the fact that the Reds were completely inflexible on this scheme, and forced him to buy 96 tickets instead of the 24 that he wanted for just those three games on that weekend. (Well boo-fucking-hoo for you.)

Maybe the Reds aren't being as "business-savvy" as the Paul Godfreys and Patrick Elsters of the world, but we salute them for not facilitating an invasion of their home park by the Most Obnoxious Fanbase in the World (TM).

TBS to broadcast live from a Rogers Centre full of Red Sox fans

Blue Jays appearances on American networks are about as rare as unblistered fingers on Al Leiter's hands. (OK...a bad metaphor, but still. We're bitter.) So imagine our surprise in finding out (from Multichannel News) that TBS plans on launching its MLB coverage this season with the Jays-Red Sox tilt from Rogers Centre on Sunday, April 6.

The kid in us feels like we should be excited about this. But how is Toronto going to look to the American TV audience as a Major League city with a stadium full of the other teams' fans...especially since the Jays front office encouraged them to come to our opening weekend?

Thank you, Paul Godfrey and Patrick Elster. We Blue Jays fans will really enjoy being a laughingstock.

Alex Rios pities the fool that doesn't dig his hair

Happy Family Day, bitches! Having just pulled ourselves out of a Jamesons and Madden 08-induced stupor, it's time to catch up on a weekend's worth of Blue Jays news.

The Hair That Ate Dunedin
Middle-aged white dudes love funny hair cuts almost as much as they love home videos of people getting hit in the nuts, so it's a good thing that Alex Rios apparently lost a drunken bet with his buddies in Puerto Rico this winter. Rios' B.A. Baracus do is all the rage, especially with Globe Junior. Rios has apparently also emulated Mr. T's musculature, as he was swatting BP pitches into the yards of unsuspecting neighbours.

In addition to follicle talk, there's more contract talk around Rios, with Blairsy reporting that the team is getting ready to talk extension with his agent this week. Also, there's only one Blue Jay (Vernon) signed beyond 2010...which is a topic for another post.

News from the Harbinger of Doom File
Travis Snider is unable to participate in Spring Training activities, because his 20 year-old elbow is all buggered up. Grrrreat.

The Star Has a Baseball Blog. Contain Your Excitement
And if Dick Griffin can figure out this new-fangled blog technology (the Speak-N-Spell nearly killed him), then we can be sure to enjoy hundreds of mentions of his days in the Expos PR shop over the next year.

Two quick thoughts on the Star blog: first, we're almost positive that Cathal Kelly used to be in the Rentals, and second, the banner ad for Antonia Zerbisias' blog that ran at the top of the page this morning scares the shit out of us.

The Recognition We So Richly Deserve
Best regards indeed to John Brattain, who awarded us (along with the Drunk Jays Fans) with the weekly Pujols Award for our incessant ranting about the Jays' ticketing bullshit.

Which reminds us: we ponied up for our opening series tickets, and couldn't get the seats that we wanted. Hmmm. Why would that be? Honestly, if we're stuck looking at the ginger asscrack hair of Sully from Worcester and his best pal Fitzy from East Brookfield all weekend, we're going to go ballistic.

And the service charges on Jays tickets? Don't even get us started.

What's this about the tickets you say?

We're really going to stop picking at this scab any day now, but we thought we'd mention that both Mike Wilner and Bob Elliot weigh in this morning on this Masshole-centric ticket-selling scheme that the Blue Jays have cooked up.

Wilner: "The term 'galactically stupid' comes to mind." (Looks like somebody watched A Few Good Men recently. We never pegged Wilner for a Tom Cruise fan.)

Elliot: "I'm no ticket broker, but shouldn't Jays fans be treated No. 1 in their own backyard?"

Let's hope that a few mainstream media mentions will get the ball rolling on this story, because we'd like to see that mangy scoundrel Paul Godfrey dragged out in public and forced to eat a bit of dog poop over this.

The fan outrage rages on...doesn't it?

Wow. We kinda lost our shit on Friday, didn't we?

It took a full weekend of being strapped down and watching the Game Show Network just to get our heart rate back to normal.

Much thanks goes out to all of those who picked up the torch over the weekend and went about setting Messers Godfrey and Elster ablaze (figuratively, of course), including the DJF, Hum and Chuck, Belong to Rios, Bottom of the Order, Ghostrunner on First and (Best Regards,) John Brattain.

And of course, all of this outrage was obviously picked up by the mainstream media.

Right? Right? Hello?...Is this thing on?

We don't want this to descend into one of those twee blog posts about how the MSM is corrupt and obviously isn't hip to the jive like us bloggers. We're just a little disappointed that after Blair poked the story with a long stick on Friday, nobody touched it. (At least, no one that we saw.)

We could go into a whole new rant, about how the media game is fixed, and how the TV rightsholders didn't want to hurt their relationships and how the birdcage liners didn't want to do anything that would limit their access to the organization.

But that'd be beneath us.

Instead, we'll just send out this Long Distance Dedication to Paul Godfrey, and all the kids in the Jays front office. This is what you get when you mess with us.

For Love or Money

We've got to take issue with Jeff Blair's assertion in his latest blog post that "there is no downside" to this ticket selling scheme.

Just so we're clear: we've got nothing against making a buck. We try to do it every day. (Just not by blogging.) And yes, we get the fact that the Blue Jays' decision to sell tickets directly to the fans of the Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox is a savvy use of Major League Baseball Advanced Media's databases.

Taken from a distance (the dispassionate distance from which Blair, or Griffin, or Fidlin or Elliot, or Sadler write), we could look at this and say: "Well, bully for them! What a bunch of smart cookies they are! Maximize revenues! Exploit new marketing opportunities!"

But we don't look at the Blue Jays as a business that sells tickets and in-stadium advertising.

If we listened to our dispassionate side, we wouldn't be frantically tapping out post after post, agonizing over John McDonald's role, or Lyle Overbay's hand, or Scott Rolen's headspace, or John Gibbons' lineup chicanery.

Nor would we buy retro powder blues (or fawn over them), or another Jays cap (to go with the five - count 'em, five - Jays caps that we already own). We wouldn't stop everything in our lives to sit and listen to Jamie Campbell prattle on about his baseball card collection, nor would we promise to spend an entire day antiquing with Mrs. Tao if only she'll let us watch this last half inning ("Seriously, Sweetie: just five more minutes!")

We wouldn't put up with hours of abuse from the brother-in-law when he gets dragged kicking and screaming to a Jays game (nor would we pay $50 for his ticket just for the privilege). We wouldn't shell out $5 on consecutive days for the exact same program, just so that we could keep score during the game.

And we wouldn't get this upset about a simple business transaction if we thought of the Blue Jays as a business.

But for us, it's not a business. It's a sacred trust.

Go ahead Blairsy: groan. Roll your eyes. We know that it is pathetically overwrought. We know that it's just a bunch of pampered millionaires hitting a horsehide ball with a wooden bat and catching it with a leather glove.

We know that the billionaire owner (Canada's second richest man, and for very good reason) determines the level of salary extravagance based on the club's ability to bums (any bums) in the seats. We're aware that if attendance had gone down last year or the year before, then maybe Vernon Wells or Alex Rios or Roy Halladay are playing in Arlington, or Miami, or Cincinnati this year.

To all of those with that level of detachment from the team: we sincerely envy you. Because it's not going to eat at you one little bit when the cheers from Red Sox Nation erupt on that opening homestand. It's not going to muddy the gleam of the new season for you at all.

But tell us this: When a member of the Red Sox drives in a run on that weekend, how will the front office quantify the impact of those extra cheering New Englanders on the home team's fans, especially since you went to such lengths to bring them here? It's going to be an awfully bitter pill to swallow, and there's nothing in Quicken Books that's going to help you make that equation.

We've waited all frickin' winter to cheer on our boys. So why did someone have to invite their fans to ruin the party?

Paul Godfrey is a Kitten-Drowning Baby-Shaker

Ok, so maybe he's not.

(Update, 2:23 PM - HOLY SHIT UPDATE BELOW!)

But he is a guy who will sign off on selling tickets to the opposing team's fans before the hometown faithful are even given the opportunity to sell the joint out themselves. Which is really very evil. And wrong. (But congrats on the Bills games, Pauley!)

Jeff Blair posts in the Globe on Baseball blog that the Jays sold $10,000 worth of tickets through these special packages to Tigers fans, but that single-game tickets are not being made available until March 2 to fans in Toronto. (Actually, we're seeing February 15 on the Jays' site, but what do we know. We don't have Paul Godrey's cell number.)

Yesterday, when we blogged about this scheme, it was with the notion that a) it hadn't yet been launched and b) that this was in response to slow sales on the home front. But for the brass to assume that we're not gonna buy tickets? So wrong.

And just so that you can get yourself all the way to the other side of the looking glass, Godfrey makes this rather absurd claim:

"We can control the flow of tickets, so if the sales get really hot we can simply shut them down."

So, let's see if we've got this straight: the Jays want to sell lots of tickets, so they sell them to people outside of the fan base first. But if they sell too many, they'll stop! Right away!

Also, one of the games being offered to Detroit fans is a Roy Halladay Kids T-Shirt Day...so will the ravenous hordes from Michigan be heading home with this powder blue gem? What frickin' use will it be to them, and moreover, what sort of marketing buzz will the Jays get when a chunk of these end up in a Detroit Metroland landfill?

Here's the point: We love the Blue Jays. Irrationally. We've already posted almost 500 items to this blog in less than a year, and we invest ourselves (financially and emotionally) in this team in a way that is quite unhealthy, to tell the truth.

And as much as Godfrey and Kevin Elster's brother are going to come out in the next day or so and spin this and say how much they love the Blue Jays fans, they don't get it. They don't get the fact that this makes Blue Jays fans and Toronto look like second-class citizens. They don't understand that this makes us feel like we're not pretty enough for them, and they don't understand why we're getting so worked up about them catting around with that skank down the road.

They really don't get it, and they likely never will, because this is their job. They are more concerned with boosting those ticket sales (for what...the sixth or seventh straight year?), because that's what they do.

We respect that they want to make the team as much of a financial success for Uncle Ted as they can, but is this really the way that they want to do it?

Update, 2:23 PM - The scandal widens!
As noted by Drunk Jays Fan Parkes in the comments (and from a different version of the Blair story than the one we read earlier), the Toronto Blue Jays are selling tickets for the OPENING GODDAMNED HOMESTAND to fans of the BOSTON EFFING MASSHOLE RED SOX.

Oh, but Godfrey is "sensitive" to the fact that maybe, just maybe, the die-hards will be a little effing pissed at the fact that the first choice of seats to the opening homestand are being offered to the douchebag fans of our chief rivals in the AL East.

It's going to be really fun to hear the Massholes cheering on the BoSox in OUR opening homestand, isn't it?

Opening the Gates to the Barbarians

What should have been a fairly benign good news article about the flood of ticket sales for the 2008 season took an ugly turn, when Patrick "Benedict Arnold" Elster announced that the Blue Jays are selling tickets for an April series with Detroit as part of a special package to Tigers fans.

Look, we know that the Red Sox fans are going to make their way north to throw beer on unsuspecting Jays fans, and that the douchey Yankee faithful from western New York are going to fill the seats on certain weekends. But to sell directly to the fans of the opposition? How's that gonna play when they're cheering their lungs out at a Miguel Cabrera moonshot?

Yeah, we know that Pat Elster is going to get credit from the corporate types for his "out of the box" thinking to fill the seats. "We would not offer games (to other fans) that we believed we would sell out on our own," the traitorous bastard told the Toronto Star.

We bet that fucker doesn't even remember Frank Tanana.