Some Fans Upset That The Red Sox Aren’t Good Enough at Begging

Fenway Park photo by Joyce Vincent / Shutterstock.com

Complaining about the Red Sox is one of the great rites of being born or living in Boston. You can complain about the pitching, you can complain about the manager, you can even complain that ownership cares too much about TV ratings and not enough about winning. But today in the Globe, we learn that some fans have found something entirely new to complain about: the team didn’t try hard enough to get them to keep their season tickets. Yes, apparently the Red Sox are not good enough at begging for some folks.

Reporter Amalie Benjamin writes that, with season ticket sales down 10 percent from last year, the team has made some efforts to win back folks who aren’t renewing. But for many Sox fans, it just hasn’t been good enough:

 To Richard Drowne, it seemed as if the Sox simply wanted to confirm he was done so they could move on to the next name on a waiting list that is at 7,500, according to senior vice president of ticketing Ron Bumgarner.

“I wouldn’t describe their call as a ‘reaching out,’” Drowne wrote in an e-mail.

“They just didn’t really put up much effort to keep me as a season ticket-holder,” said Matt Hynes, who told the team he would be interested in renewing if he could get better seats.

So the Red Sox called, but they didn’t say the right thing. Well, they never were very good at relationships anyway. But here’s what makes Hynes’ case particularly tragic: he seems like he didn’t really want to break up, but certainly wasn’t going to be the one to say they should stay together, and it was only going to be on his terms anyway, so he said, fine, you know what, it’s over if you’re not going to get down on your knees.

And then we come to the case of Phil Ferraguto, a season ticket holder since 1986:

 “I never got a call or an e-mail or anything saying, ‘Do you want to rethink this? Are you sure?’ They didn’t even question the fact that I was bailing. In fact, I was even hurt by it, disappointed. We’re ending this marriage and you’re not even going to ask why?”

Man, wait til Matt Hynes hears about this! They didn’t even call Ferraguto! They just cast him off into the great, season-ticket-less ether, an emotional wreck suddenly without a Fenway Park seat to call his own. Oh, how it must hurt. I hope he doesn’t need therapy.

Joking aside, Ferraguto is an adult who says he had been spending $15,000 per season on baseball tickets. Drowne and Hynes are also adults who made what is very likely a financial decision to not renew their tickets. Of course it would have been good customer service for the Red Sox to contact them and try to convince them to stay on board. But come on! You’re grown men! The tickets are a financial transaction. One might even argue that by not bombarding you with calls and emails, the Red Sox—with their waiting list of 7,500—are simply respecting your ability to make decisions as adult human beings. It’s not for nothing that we Red Sox fans have acquired the reputation of being the neediest, most entitled fans in sports. Stuff like this doesn’t help. Let’s get it together, people.