First Pitch Tickets

I saw my first Cardinals game of the year last night and even though the outcome was horribly dissappointing (losing 3-2 on a run in the 9th...still no hitting...Albert is at .259!?!) the reason I was even there is why I am writing.

Our staff team had a fun day outing planned to finish off the year and we went down to St. Louis to go to the zoo and see the arch and all that...no baseball game planned because most of our team are not into baseball ("needs to develop" area of a vision plan comes to mind). But when I found out my brother and a friend would be at the game I realized I could have a ride back if I stayed too.

Problem...there weren't any more tickets in their section, which was the all-you-can-eat buffet section on the Party Bridge...meaning I wouldn't be able to get in there. However, I remembered a new promo at Busch that I heard about from a friend called First Pitch Tickets. I called up a friend in St Louis to see if he would be available to go to the game with me if I could get the tickets (even though I probably would have gone by myself anyway) and it turned out that he was available.

When our team got down to downtown St Louis I stopped by the stadium and asked if there were any First Pitch Tickets left. They were. This was at 11:15am or so. The First Pitch tickets are opened up at 9am every game day. The first 125 people to pay $11 at the ticket window get a voucher for a pair of tickets to that night's game. You bring the voucher and id to a certain gate 15 minutes to game time and they start letting people in and giving them an envelope with two random tickets in it...could be standing room, could be box seats...anything.

So, we got in line an hour till start and got in as the national anthem was being sung. They gave me an envelope and we had two seats in the Loge Box along the rightfield line. Second deck, normally $38 a piece. And we got them for $5.50 each! I don't know why they started doing this deal, but it is amazing. If you can get down to the stadium earlier that day it is so worth doing. If your whole trip was planned around it you might want to make sure you had tickets already (and I'm sure if it was a Cubs series or another big game there would be a line) since there are a limited number, but I may have to do this a lot more often.

Do any other parks do this? I think Busch started doing it last year, but I hadn't heard of anything like it before. I'm checking into that again for sure next time I go down. Maybe they will be hitting by then.