Major League Baseball

Marlins find odd way to honor no-hitter

Published Sep. 30, 2013 1:00 a.m. ET

Sam Gardner

For just $15, loyal fans of the Miami Marlins — all seven of you — can buy a ticket to the hottest game of the season, a bargain at twice the price.

There’s just one catch: The game has already been played.

According to Miami ABC affiliate WPLG, the Marlins have taken 9,100 unsold tickets from Henderson Alvarez’s season-ending no-hitter Sunday and put them up for sale.

So if you weren’t there to watch Miami get its 62nd win of the season — and given that this was a Marlins game, I assume most of you weren’t — you can at least tell all of your friends that you were.

If it sounds like a ridiculous last-ditch effort to get a few more bucks out of fans, it’s because it is — but it’s actually a step up from the last promotion the Marlins offered after a historic pitching outing.

In 2010, the then-Florida Marlins sold tickets to a Roy Halladay perfect game — and Halladay threw his for the opposing team. (And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the Marlins sold those “seats” at face value and factored them into the official attendance number.)

It's not totally unheard of for a team to sell tickets to a historic game after the fact, and the Marlins aren’t alone in doing it.

The White Sox were the first to try it in 2009 after Mark Buehrle threw a perfect game against the Rays. The Rays offered a fundraiser package themselves in 2010 that included an "authenticated" ticket from a Matt Garza no-hitter.

Then last year, the Mets sold commemorative tickets after Johan Santana became the first player in franchise history to toss a no-no.

But when a team like the Marlins tries to bilk fans out of an extra $136,500 for commemorative tickets to a completed game at an empty stadium that will eventually cost the local taxpayers billions — with a 'B' — it seems worthy of a little extra ridicule.