Except there was a problem. The secondary ticket market had collapsed. Seats were selling for pennies or going empty. Interest in the team had waned so badly that Auerbach, who lives in Connecticut, couldn’t find anyone to take September Yankees tickets off his hands at even three-quarters of the price.

So, after one not-so-glorious year as a season ticket-holder, Auerbach is relinquishing the seats.

“We had every intention of sharing the wealth with family and friends, and perhaps donating a handful of tickets,” said Auerbach, who called his State Street Pavilion tickets “the best ever,’’ adding, “What ended up happening is that we couldn’t even sell the tickets for face value.”

As detailed in a Globe story Feb. 1, Red Sox brass acknowledged that season-ticket sales last month were down 10 percent from a year ago. The team is making an effort to woo back season ticket-holders. There have been phone banks, with interns and ticketing staffers and even CEO Larry Lucchino and third baseman Will Middlebrooks placing calls.

To many, it seemed more like a half-hearted courtesy by the team — not a real effort to persuade these fans to renew their tickets. 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.

“I saw the numbers in the Globe, they’re down 10 percent over last year. And I was like, ‘Wow, you’d think they’d put a little more effort into it.’ ”

Both chief operating officer Sam Kennedy and Bumgarner said the team has made every effort to speak with season ticket-holders who have not renewed, though they acknowledged that people who told them early and definitively may not have gotten calls.

“I certainly understand that if people didn’t hear from us, that’s unacceptable,” Kennedy said. “Because it was our goal to try to reach everybody.”

Bumgarner said the Sox are in phase one of their season-ticket process. They are wrapping up contacting the current ticket-holders and will move on to offering upgrades in the next week or so. Only after they have attempted to upgrade people will they then turn to the waiting list.

But, said 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?

“They dropped the ball in the last couple of years, with the way the team was run. It just seemed like they stopped caring about the fans.”

The Sox are hoping to get back to their season-ticket cap of 22,000 by the time the season starts. If that doesn’t happen, prorated season-ticket packages will be sold after Opening Day, something the team has started doing only in the last couple of years.

“Season ticket-holders are, to be trite, the lifeblood of our organization,” Bumgarner said. “Certainly every business in the world can do a better job of servicing their customers, and we definitely want to do a better job of servicing our customers.

“We do feel like we do a good job and we feel like we provide a good experience for them from the moment that a phone call is made until the moment that they come to the game to the moment that they walk out the door.”

The love affair with the Red Sox reached its zenith in the magical, world championship 2004 season and the following year, when people would do just about anything to make it into Fenway Park. That has ended, with rising ticket prices and falling performances. And so, many people — even longtime season ticket-holders – are getting out.