Fans scooped up tickets Friday for the Washington Nationals’ first post-season games since 1933. Within hours of the tickets going on sale on the Nationals website at 10 a.m., the home games for the first playoff series were sold out - except for a few $315 seats in the party suites.
The Nats clinched a trip to the playoffs Thursday night with a 4-1 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Fans who were not lucky enough to get tickets through the team’s site can still get them -- but they'll have to pay.
Ticket reseller StubHub had thousands of seats for Nationals postseason home games listed for sale Friday, with prices ranging from a little more than $63 for the second home game of the National League Divisional Series to as much as $500 for the cheapest ticket to the fourth home game of a potential World Series.
If that’s too rich for your blood, the Nationals said they would release a “limited” number of standing-room-only seats on the day of each game - including World Series games, if the Nats make it that far.
Since it’s been generations since Washington baseball fans had to worry about the rules for post-season tickets, the ticket sellers are taking precautions to make sure buyers know how the purchases work. Fans can buy tickets for any possible game in the Divisional Series, the National League Championship Series and the World Series.
But, obviously, all those games may not be played.
The NLDS is a best-of-five series and the NLCS and World Series are best-of-seven series. Single-ticket buyers today are told that if the game they purchase is not played, they will get a refund of the ticket price and any fees.
Buyers don’t know when the games will be played. That schedule will be set by Major League Baseball after the playoff teams are known.
To manage the "large amount" of web traffic that hit the Nationals site this morning, Major League Baseball rolled out a new "virtual waiting room." Anyone looking for tickets was first sent to the waiting room. Random users were then chosen to escape the waiting room and buy tickets.
The waiting room was immediately the target of online scorn from users who never had the chance to buy tickets.
Chris Gargani, the Nats' vice president and managing director of sales and client services, said the waiting room was "a relatively new feature used to manage demand" by the MLB.
