World-Serious Fans

In Denver, a Short Wait for a Winning Team Ends in a Mile-High Wait for Tickets

DENVER, Oct. 23 -- How badly does Eduardo Casias want tickets to the first World Series ever to be played in Colorado?

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Badly enough to take off work Tuesday, so he could stand in the piercing autumn sun outside Coors Field, balancing a pair of laptops on the trunk of his Dodge Charger. Every time a box on one of the Web-linked screens counted down and started over, again and again and again, he looked more anguished.

With Internet ticket sales creeping along at a maddening pace, Casias stayed in touch with a buddy standing in line at the stadium with more than a hundred other desperate Colorado Rockies fans, acting on nothing more than a hunch that ticket windows might actually open.

Even when the team spokesman reaffirmed at an emergency news conference that all seats would be sold over the Web, fans stuck around, hoping against hope. In a humdrum season that delivered an utterly unexpected trip to the Series, why not wish for another gift -- an actual seat to the show?

Rockies fans share little of the patented angst of their Red Sox brethren, who waited 86 years between World Series titles. Indeed, the team is so new that plenty of major league regulars have been playing in the bigs longer than the 15 seasons the Rockies have existed. Yet baseball mania is a sublime thing, whether in Yankee pinstripes, Florida teal, Cardinals red or Colorado purple and black.

This town is so excited that the governor declared this the month of Rocktober, and the team rushed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to seek exclusive rights to the name.

"It's unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. Surreal," exclaimed Joe Pettenger, a bartender who carried his laptop to the Denver Public Library on Tuesday. Without computer service or cable at home, he connected to the free WiFi in search of the elusive tickets.

"It's almost like it's Opening Day every day around here," Pettenger, 25, said. He remembers attending the Rockies' first home game in Mile High Stadium in 1993 when his mother won a publicity contest created by the new team. He still has a miniature bat given out as a souvenir that night. "I just got my hair cut. It was all 70-year-old men there, and that's all anyone talked about."

To be talking baseball in Denver in October, er, Rocktober, is rarer than early snow.

"When was the last time people weren't talking about the Broncos?" wondered Jack Richardson, 45, referring to the city's pro football team. He was seated in a portable canvas rocking chair beneath a huge colorful umbrella in the phantom ticket line. "It's huge. Huge for the city, huge for the people."

Perhaps most especially for people who could score seats. When selling the roughly 20,000 seats left for each game after season-ticket holders got their allotment, the Rockies management looked more like the Rookies management.

The trouble started Monday, when the team's assurances of smooth Internet sales were swamped by 8.5 million attempts in 90 minutes. Only 500 tickets were sold. Vowing to get things right on the second attempt, the team opened the site at noon Tuesday, only to leave countless fans ticketless and fuming -- and not getting much work done.