Buying Perfection

Incredibly, this weekend produced the third no hitter, and the second perfect game, of the 2010 Major League Baseball season (see my previous perfect game-related post here).  As amazing as this is, especially considering there have only been twenty perfect games thrown in all of MLB history, what's even more remarkable is the Florida Marlins announcement that the team will be selling the unsold tickets to Roy Halladay's perfect game at face value.  This means that you can buy tickets to a game that already happened, either to own a little piece of history, lie to your friends and tell them you were at the game, or try to resell the ticket stub for a profit.  From ESPN.com:

All tickets will be regularly priced at "face value" and on sale both online and through the Marlins' box office.  Paid attendance that night was about 25,000, a relatively large crowd for a Marlins' home game. By comparison, Florida drew a paid crowd of 10,115 -- its smallest of the season -- for Monday's game against Milwaukee.

For a while, I used to save the ticket stubs from every sporting event I went to.  The bulletin board attached to my bedroom wall in my parent's house is loaded with stubs from the games of the Huntsville Stars, New York Dragons, St. John's Red Storm and other assorted teams.  My brother and I treated these tickets as badges of honor, each one a symbol of accomplishment (especially Montreal Expos ticket stubs; sitting though a whole baseball game at Olympic Stadium was often a painful experience).  Just like a college freshman who keeps his empty beer bottles on the windowsill as a testament to his budding alcoholism, we thought the tickets granted us admission into an exclusive club of true sports fans.

Why spend money on ticket stubs to a game you didn't even attend?

In light of this upbringing, the sale of Roy Halladay's perfect game tickets seems shallow and cheap.  Unless you're an avid sports memorabilia collector (in which case, it's likely that all the merchandise you own originally came from someone else anyway), what joy can you possibly get from a ticket stub from a game that you didn't attend?  Instead of spending money on the ticket as a keepsake, I wish fans would instead buy tickets to a future game where they might see something magical happen in person.  It might be a while until something impressive happens at a Marlins game again, though, so fans might want to spend the money they'll save on Dolphins tickets instead.