

The game plan was to get into Game 5 of the World Series for as little as possible. Armed with $75 cash and another couple hundred digital dollars by way of Venmo and PayPal, I set off to Houston. Phone fully charged, chin up, I wasn’t really sure what to expect, this being my inaugural journey into championship game territory.

The Astros have never won a World Series, I’ve never been to one, and New Orleans is close enough to Minute Maid Park that if you’re someone like me you’re absolutely renting a car, zipping west on I-10, and rolling the dice. The scene was pretty bare when I arrived about five and a half hours before the game — which would itself wind up being about 5 and a half hours long.

2:05pm: “I have no idea what the laws are”

Even though ending up in jail would make for a better post, there’s no wifi behind bars, so I wanted to make sure I’d meet my deadline. My first step was checking in with the Houston police officers who were near the ballpark to get the scoop. The first couple of cops had no idea what the actual laws were and when the second pair of cops also had no idea, I took my question online and discovered, from the Houston Press:

In Texas, unsurprisingly, there’s no state law against ticket scalping, and in Houston there is only a city ordinance that makes it illegal to sell them on public property inside city limits without a permit. There’s also no limit on the amount of money a person may try to resell a ticket for, so even if you grew up hearing cautionary tales about the shady business of buying tickets from a scalper, there’s nothing making that line of work illegal.

This non-answer didn’t make me feel better about engaging in conversations with strangers just across the street from the ballpark.



2:45pm: “I’m not interested in a story”

On the other side of the main entrance to the game were two “Licensed Ticket Vendors” tents. The signage implied that everyone else selling tickets on the street was not licensed and therefore not legal. When I asked the official-seeming man in the Hawaiian shirt on the laptop if this were true, he said he wasn’t interested in talking to me for a story. Then he told me I was preventing him from conducting business and he would call the cops if I didn’t leave. Bye!

Back near the park, the number of sellers were swelling and fans were swarming. Until this moment I’d been kind of hesitant to be noticeably looking for a ticket. But now people were holding up fingers a few away away from the police. I asked a cop to clarify what the law was, why was it okay for these people to be selling tickets this close to the stadium. He told me that jaywalking was also illegal and asked what was stopping him from arresting me on the spot. Again, there’s no wifi in jail, so I apologized for bothering the man and left.

5:00pm: “You undercover?”

I circled the park far too many times, and at this point, it became clear to me that with every lap I took, either more people became suspicious of me, or my awful luck was making me paranoid. Scalpers think I’m an undercover cop, cops think I’m up to something, everyone is skeptical, and I’m just digging for cheap tickets.

At one point I find myself wondering if the drug and/or bomb sniffing dogs are capable of sniffing out people selling illegal tickets. Standing room on Stubhub is still around $500.