What the world needs is more gambling and more ticket scalping.
Just kidding there, folks. It is lonely out here, tilting against the forces of alleged progress. But as Big Business and Big Sports rebrand the once-slimy practice of ticket scalping as "the secondary market" and muscle out the small-timers, just as state lotteries muscled out the numbers runners, it is comforting to have the best team in football on my side.
In a sports world that is almost always about the money, the 14-0 New England Patriots have gone against the grain by consistently saying no to scalping, which is about nothing but the money (and, by the way, still illegal here). It is really quite a remarkable stand, all things considered.
This week, giant Ticketmaster won the hotly contested bidding to become the Official Ticket Scalper of the National Football League. The deal will mean maybe $20 million for the league and the teams, but the Patriots have made clear they don't want any part of it (as have a handful of other clubs). They also don't want any part of the move in the Legislature to deregulate ticket sales.
Instead, the Patriots will continue doing what they are doing: allowing season ticket holders to sell tickets at face value to fans on the team's season-ticket waiting list. Those sales also go through Ticketmaster, but the team doesn't make a dime off it.
"They're fighting the forces of nature," a spokesman for StubHub, a Ticketmaster rival that has been at war with the Patriots over scalping, told my colleague Bruce Mohl. "They are just philosophically against the way of the world."
The Kraft family, who have turned the Patriots into a model franchise, are not stupid businessmen. They know that it was not that long ago, before they arrived on the scene in 1994, that there could be 35,000 people in the stands and 300 arrests in the Animal House culture that was the sorry old Foxboro Stadium. The drinking and hooliganism was so bad that the network pulled the plug on Monday Night Football there. It was a bad customer experience, on and off the field.
The Krafts have largely fixed that. Better security has helped. So has the new Gillette Stadium. But knowing who is sitting where, and holding them accountable, has made a difference, too. It can still be raw in some sections of Gillette Stadium on a Sunday night, but the experience is night and day from the bad old days. Consider: The team had back-to-back games in October with not a single arrest. That is something you should appreciate if you are in the stands on Sunday for the Miami game.
This is just plain good business. It is also good for the customer. At $90, the average Patriots ticket is expensive enough; scalping, by whatever name, doesn't make it any cheaper. I like the free market, too, but pro sports are not a true free market. There are more than 50,000 people on the waiting list for Patriots season tickets, but the Krafts aren't about to expand the stadium and the NFL is not about to put a second franchise here because of demand.
Ticket scalping is a little like jaywalking: We don't enforce the laws against either, but we don't need to encourage them. The Krafts have made a stand for a little civility in society, even if it is fighting the forces of nature. Good for them.
Neighborhood news: Concern has broken out over the Winthrop bill, legislation designed to outlaw discrimination in cooperative housing in Massachusetts. Named (by me) for the man who blocked the owner of Elizabeth Grady Cos. from buying a unit in a Beacon Street co-op building last year, the legislation has created concerns among developers (Boston's Robert Beal, to name one) and affordable housing advocates that it could have unintended consequences. Beal, for instance, thinks it could undermine his marketing of a Cambridge co-op aimed at alumni and employees of Harvard, MIT, and Massachusetts General Hospital. More sympathetically, others say it could affect housing for the elderly and the disabled. The bill is aimed at snobs, not the elderly. Fix it and pass it now.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.
