Pittsburgh Pirates Postseason Ticket Information Spurs Dark Memories: Three Rivers Had 10,000 Empty Seats for Playoffs

Well, we can’t wait to get our Pittsburgh Pirates postseason ticket INFORMATION.  How big was that win yesterday for the Pirates?  Thank God for Garrett Jones, A.J. Burnett, Pedro Alvarez, and the Bucs for easing the sting that could have been associated with the words playoff tickets after such a miserable homestand.

James McDonald will give us more reason to believe we can start pulling off the Benjamins for the tickets with a good start in St. Louis oday.  The series against the Cardinals is going to be an important test for the Pirates.  A couple of wins, a few more Pedro Bombs, and playoff revenue starts flowing into Nuttings account next week.

If the Bucs drop a few, we really think fans are going to wait before they pull the trigger.

We think it makes sense to pull the trigger.  The secondary market alone is massive these days–you know that.  So want to know how pissed I am?  We saw a block of four tickets being available in a serious primetime location before the season started.  We passed on them.  So stupid.  It won’t happen again.

Anyway, we can’t recall why, but when we heard the other day that playoff ticket information would drop on Monday–Coonelly said it will land tomorrow–either way, the timing worked out for the Bucs.

We thought about the playoff ticket announcement most of the week.  It made our skin crawl thinking about when the Bucs were going to announce the news.  It’s not like it could have been avoided, right?

So while we were thinking our thoughts drifted to 1992.

Instead of having fans buy the entire series, the Pirates sold individual tickets for the playoffs.  Three Rivers was a bit too large, or so they say—what a joke.  Pittsburgh is a baseball town my ass.  Pittsburgh had 13,000 in attendance for Roberto’s 3,000th hit.

Maybe that can change.

PNC Park is going to be too small, and tickets are going to be hot—should the Bucs get to the promised land, but anyway, check out this AP article from October 10, 1992 that details the attendance

"The Pittsburgh Pirates have appeared in a league-record nine National League Championship Series and been host to 17 playoff games before last night’s Game 3 of the NLCS with the Atlanta Braves.But the Pirates had been unable to sell out Three Rivers Stadium for any NLCS game until last night, when 56,610 watched, the third-largest crowd in team history.Rick Cerrone, the Pirates’ vice president for public relations, said tonight’s Game 4 is also sold out, and only 2,000 general admission seats are left for Game 5. Cerrone said that game would have been an advance sellout if the original starting time of 4 p.m. had been kept.CBS requested last week that Major League Baseball flip the start times of the American and National League games on Sunday, when the Braves, who televise most of their games on a cable superstation that reaches most of the country, would be involved and attract a larger audience in prime time.Cerrone said he believes the weekend sellouts will vindicate the Pirates’ fans, who took a national beating last year, when the seventh game of the NLCS was not sold out, and more than 10,000 of Three Rivers’ more than 56,000 seats were vacant.“We could probably have sold another 25,000 tickets for [tonight’s] game, even with Pitt and Notre Dame playing across town,” Cerrone said.Cerrone said the blame for the failure to sell out Game 7 last year lies not with Pittsburgh fans, but with the Pirates themselves, who, unlike many clubs, including the Orioles, do not require fans to buy strips of playoff tickets, but sell them on an individual game basis.“We’re not going to say to the guy who comes to 10 games a year and pays $5 a game, ‘You have to pay $25 a game and buy seven of them [covering the NLCS and the World Series],’ ” Cerrone said.Cerrone said the Pirates’ attendance this season has been hurt by the five-month absence of the city’s daily newspapers, because of a strike by the Teamsters union.He said the club was on pace to break last year’s record season attendance of 2.065 million, before the strike, but finished at 1.8 million."