Jay Alves: What we’ve known all along
Longtime readers and sports blog junkies might recall this business from last year. What you see there is that I contacted Jay Alves about MLB’s press pass policy. What you don’t see is that after I posted his reply e-mails, he responded with a rather testy and insulting e-mail that, surprisingly, did not even ask me to remove his e-mails. It was simply an angry rant.
Now, the nation gets to see the man’s true colors. For a PR guy, Alves has very little tact and even less charm. The plan to sell tickets exclusively online, whether his brainchild or not, was flawed to begin with. Everyone and their mother predicted it would crash Monday, and low and behold, it did. In steps Jay Alves, who first claimed that tickets were being sold just fine, and then admitted that for whatever reason, the ticket servers had been unable to handle the load of requests. Fair enough, but it quickly became clear that the Rockies didn’t have a backup plan in the event of a server failure - in fact, they didn’t even have a statement prepared. Instead, Jay quickly made up the excuse that evenue.net had been subject to a “malicious attack,” yelled at a few reporters who questioned the official story, and told fans to check back tomorrow.
The attack story was pitiful before Alves flatly refused to provide any details about it; that just made the excuse easier to see through. The truth is, there is no way Evenue’s servers were subject to any kind of attack. The Rockies said they recorded 8.5 million hits in 90 minutes, or about 1,574 hits per second. Your run-of-the-mill targeted denial of service attack floods servers with tens or hundreds of thousands of requests per second, not just over 1,000. Look at it this way: 8.5 million hits would reflect 1 million potential ticket buyers refreshing the now infamous countdown page 8 or 9 times in 90 minutes. Given that the page was set to re-load every 60 seconds, 8.5 million hits is not out of the question.
The bottom line: they should have been prepared, they weren’t, and they lied. Jay should have calmly approached the podium at 2pm Mountain and announced that they were having server problems but that they would open ticket sales at King Soopers locations for local buyers and via telephone for out-of-state customers. Instead, Alves concocted a completely transparent lie, snapped at reporters when they questioned him on it, and totally lost his cool. Had he been honest and calm about the situation, had he even pretended to be prepared, fans may have been willing to spare the organization a little grief.
As it is, frustration is boiling over in Denver. Regardless of how ticket sales actually went down on Tuesday, many fans will want to see Alves’ butt flying from a Rockpile flagpole if Coors Field is anything but jam packed with Rockies fans - not ticket brokers or New England residents - come Saturday. Personally, I don’t blame them.
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