Box office
Earlier in the year I rummaged through a number of boxes shoved into various corners of the basement and found scattered ticket stubs from baseball games I’ve attended over the years. I had already amassed a large amount of tickets over the years and they followed me from as I moved from adolescence to adulthood. I was always a packrat. My mother would often move my piles of papers and books around our apartment while she attempted to keep order and cleanliness. Inevitably I always had a draw full of these ticket stubs, stained and bursting out from a folder somewhere in a drawer.
I wanted to start the process of sorting and organizing my baseball fandom. On a few occasions I’ve been asked to estimate how many games I’ve attended (if you meet a baseball fan at a bar, it’s a good ice breaker question). For whatever reason I always offered the number ‘200’. Napkin math said that even if I only attended five games a year in pre-adolescence that number significantly increased as I started working moved during my teenage years and into adulthood.
Most of my tickets were bouncing around a crappy team giveaway drawstring bag, an unfortunate fate for these snapshots in time. I decided to keep my tickets in something better suited for this task — a beautiful, sturdy box with a montage of yearbook covers throughout Mets history. As a partial ticket plan holder during the 2012 season the tickets and yearbook were delivered inside. The glossy finish gave it a collectible feel that drew me to it the moment my friend Danny and I split the tickets and yearbook over coffee and cannoli’s in Little Italy.
These are some of the dimensions i’m interested in:
Overall W-L record of Mets team during games I attended. I was a partial season ticket holder during some down years and so I suspect this will be sub .500
Number of games attended. > 200 would be an accomplishment!
Total face value of tickets
Games attended per year
Tally of games against each opponent. My gut says I’ve seen far too many games against the Phillies.
While I’ve collected this huge pile of tickets over the years it’s imperfect. I never really developed a system for preserving or counting these stubs and so it’s likely that I’ve lost some along the way.