For lucky Twins fans, ticket to tiebreaker caps wild ride

Thanks to her granddaughter's quick and persistent finger, 78-year-old Claire Foushee, of Deephaven, will be one of the lucky ones today.

She will be perched in the front row of the upper deck, hanging over the third-base line, when the Twins play the Detroit Tigers in a sold-out, tie-breaker game at 4 p.m.

"I pressed re-dial for 45 straight minutes Sunday before I got through -- must have been more than 300 times," Mimi Marceau, 29, of Eden Prairie, said with a beaming smile. She picked up seven tickets Monday for four generations of her family -- from Claire down to Claire's 21-month-old great-granddaughter, Isabelle.

Not everyone was so fortunate. More than 320,000 callers flooded 1-800-33TWINS between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, hoping to catch an eyewitness glimpse of yet another potential baseball finale for the Metrodome.

For countless other fans, there was nothing refreshing about pounding the refresh button over and over on computers trying to get tickets from swamped websites.

Today's game highlights a harmonic convergence for local sports nuts such as Bill Zenner, 64, of Blaine. He kept stats at the high school football game Friday night, attended the Gophers-Wisconsin game on Saturday, took in the homer-laced Twins game Sunday -- not to mention the Brett Favre Bowl on Monday night. He will be back for today's play-in game -- wearing his Minnesota Wild windbreaker, of all things.

"We have Wild tickets, too, but someone else will have to use those," he said, shrugging off the chance to zip across the river after the ninth inning to catch the puck drop at the Wild's home opener tonight. "It's doesn't get better than this. We're just tickled to have the opportunity to see all these thrills."

For some, a shutout

Again, not everyone is so tickled. Scores of fans complained about the scarcity of tickets, especially when online ticket outlets boasted more than 1,500 available seats -- of course, for steeper prices.

Fansnap.com, a California-based ticket search engine launched in March by the kayak.com cyber travel folks, had 1,602 tickets available to today's game for an average price of $71.50; the cheapest tickets offered were priced at $45.

"The vast majority of the tickets we have come from fans or ticket brokers and are posted on 50-plus websites from eBay to StubHub," said Christian Anderson, a fansnap.com spokesman.

StubHub, another online ticket broker, posted an average price of $78 for today's game -- the second-highest grossing Twins game in the website's history, behind only Sunday's alleged Metrodome finale. (For comparison's sake, Vikings-Packers tickets averaged $219 with a $113 low.)

Deluged Twins officials said the compressed two-day turnaround made matters tough. They capped phone and advance purchases at a dozen per person and set the online limit at 20. Those large limits might have helped the so-called secondary market (read scalpers) beat out real fans.

"Those limits are customary and needed to move the tickets," Twins spokesman Kevin Smith said. "If we say you can only buy four, we'll get four times more calls."

Twins ticket manager Paul Froehle said some ticket brokers hire people to work the phones, lines and websites, and there's little the team can do about it.

"We had a day and a half to pull this together," Froehle said.

And that worked out fine for Tommy Olson, who will celebrate his 13th birthday at the Twins game today, thanks to his patient grandfather, Doug Hoelscher, 71, of Golden Valley. He showed up Monday morning and, like the Twins, refused to have his hopes dashed.

"They had only single partial view seats in the nosebleed section," Hoelscher said. "But I hung around until noon and two opened up in the lower level and I got lucky."

Not far away, season-ticket holder Julian Loscalzo was picking up his seats. He is the guy who led the 1977 "Save the Met" campaign.

"I don't see anyone wearing Save the Metrodome T-shirts," Loscalzo said. "This place has always been a terrible place for baseball, but what a way to go out."

Staff writer Roman Augustoviz contributed to this report. Curt Brown • 612-673-4767