Opening-day tickets to the 45,550-seat RFK Stadium are still becoming available at face value, but they are being parceled out slowly, and are not the best in the house.
A team "e-mail lottery" that began at 7 p.m. Saturday and ended at noon yesterday will give 400 fans the option of buying up to four opening-night tickets each. More than 27,000 people registered for the lottery, according to Cope. All agreed on their registration forms not to resell any tickets they won the right to buy.
Ticket brokers, and Nationals officials, say the historic nature of the April 14 game is pushing up prices.
(Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
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Today, each lottery winner will get an e-mail from the Nationals with instructions on how to buy these tickets. The tickets will be forfeited if they are not bought tomorrow or Friday.
"The tickets -- in the $7 to $15 range -- will all be upstairs because our season-ticket holders have the downstairs tickets," Cope said.
Asked if the team will enforce the no-resale rule, Cope said: "In the real world? No. I will not be following these 400 people around to enforce that."
An additional 4,500 to 7,500 seats being released on Saturday "will also be upstairs," Cope said.
Want better seats? Brokers with names such as GreatSeats, StageFront Tickets and Coast to Coast Tickets are awaiting your call.
Matta, who began selling tickets in the late 1970s as a student at Bowie High School, said he has sold Nationals' opening-night seats in all prices ranges in recent weeks. He realizes, he said, that the notion of paying $200 for a $7 ticket is distasteful to some.
"But it's not like I buy any of these tickets for $7 and sell them for $150 or $200," he said. "The tickets may pass through a couple of hands, starting with a season-ticket holder, before they get to me. And everybody wants to make money along the way.
"This is still real estate. Any way you want to compare it, it's real estate. Yeah, you don't own this piece of property for the rest of your life, but you own it for three hours."
Matta said he paid about $60 for the $7 "upstairs" tickets he's offering to the Nationals' opening-night game. He, in turn, sells that ticket for about $200. He said he paid about $250 for the $45 "downstairs" tickets, which he offers for between $700 and $900.
Next season's opening-game tickets at RFK probably won't command more than a few hundred dollars, he said.
"Look at the Orioles: Traditionally, we sell their opening-day seats at anywhere from $100 to $300," Matta said.
Marquee teams such as the Yankees are a different breed, Matta said, and their best opening-day seats routinely sell for between $1,000 and $3,000. "There are 17 million people in that [New York] area . . . and everybody wants to see the Yankees," he said.
Don't want to buy from a broker? Then log on to eBay.
Yesterday, an eBay seller in Alexandria was offering two $10 outfield seats to the Nationals' opening-night game. By yesterday afternoon, the tickets had attracted eight bids from four people. The top bid was $300.
"If I carded everyone who wanted to buy tickets and then said, 'How are you going to use them?' I would become the director of sales prevention," Cope said with a laugh. "My goal is to allow as many people as possible to purchase tickets to our games. What they do after they have them, I just can't worry about that. We are in the business of selling tickets."
