from San Jose Mercury, October 16, 2002

People willing to trade almost everything for World Series tickets
By Renee Koury and Aaron Davis

I'll trade you World Series tickets for a date, a house, my car, free electrical work...or, get ready for this, your sperm.

Standing in line and waiting online for official World Series tickets gave way today to a whole host of entrepreneurial deals that were impossible with an infant Internet in 1989, last time the World Series came to town.

The buzz of morning talk shows was the offer that Craigslist.org founders said takes the cake: A woman offered two prime World Series tickets for a sperm donor -- "tickets for something you already do," read the ad. The woman promised the resulting child would be brought up as a Giants fan.

As dawn broke, the race was on to buy, sell, trade, barter and covet a precious few thousand tickets to the San Francisco Giants' first World Series in 13 years.

The red-brick Pacific Bell Park took on a carnival-like atmosphere as 1,750 fans, who'd been shackled since Monday with orange wristbands entitling them to get in line, waited for their rightful crack at up to four tickets each.

At the end of the ticket line stood a covey of predators with big wads of cash who pounced on them before they could tuck away their sought-after prize, offering them three or four times the face value of the tickets.

"I just walked right past those guys, even though a guy said he'd give me $500 each," said Dana Wentworth of Pacifica, who bought two lower box seats for $145 each and two club box seats for $175 apiece. "Hey, I'm not interested...I don't think."

Thousands more people jammed the Giants' online ticket sales service hoping for a chance to buy 7,000 more tickets that way. And still more fans begged for tickets on the Craigslist electronic bulletin board, or offered them for sale at upward of $1,000 each on eBay.

"I've waited here for three days and camped out and I still am like 900th in line," said Neal Windsor of San Jose, a window-shades business owner who had waited since Saturday. "But it's worth it. The Giants are worth it."