The Boston Red Sox completed their comeback against the Cleveland Indians last night, winning Game 7 of the ALCS 11-2 to set up a Colorado - Boston World Series. While the Red Sox have already been installed as prohibitive favorites by every talking head, the Rockies did take 2 of 3 in Boston earlier this year. In the series in June, the Rockies outscored the Red Sox 20-5 over the 3 games, beating Josh Beckett and Curt Schilling while losing to Tim Wakefield. Game 1 of the World Series is in Boston at 6 pm Wednesday night. The first ever World Series game in Denver is Game 3 at 6 pm on Saturday, October 27 and Andrea and I should be there.
On a related note, the Rockies put the World Series tickets up for sale today at 10 am in a first come, first serve fashion at coloradorockies.com. To the surprise of no one but the Rockies and their ticketing provider, Paciolan, the website immediately melted down. While Paciolan says they don’t know what happened, any computer professional can clearly state exactly what happened. The number of people attempting to access the site clearly exceeded the capability of their load balancer and back-end servers, resulting in the equivalent of a distributed denial of service attack. The servers were so overwhelmed with connection requests that they failed to respond to any of them. The Rockies stated that there were approximately 8.5 million hits on the site between 10 and 11 am this morning. While the number sounds large, the systems I work on at Visa deal with approximately 4 times that number of requests on peak days like the day after Christmas and don’t skip a beat. In the process the Rockies managed to sell less than 500 of the 18,000 available tickets and the crush brought down Paciolan’s entire North American network.
Paciolan and the Rockies swore that they had the resources to handle the World Series ticket load. They clearly didn’t. They even had load problems with the season ticket holder presale on Sunday afternoon, and that was only open to the 8000 or so season ticket holders. This was an easily predictable and preventable problem. We’re just fortunate that we got our tickets at the presale yesterday.
It’s unfortunate that the Rockies managed to squander so much community goodwill with this fiasco. Hopefully their announcement at 5 pm about resuming ticket sales will help restore some of the faith in the Rockies organization and get the seats of Coors Field filled with purple this weekend. The World Series, yes, the WORLD SERIES, still starts on Wednesday!
Go Rockies!!!
