By Will Lingo
(contributing: J.J. Cooper, Matthew Eddy, Will Kimmey, Chris Kline, John Manuel and Alan Matthews)
May 17, 2004

FIRST INNING

But for now Bishop is pitching in at the ticket booth, which is under siege from last-minute fans. The Bulls almost never have a walkup crowd of less than 1,000 fans, but tonight it will be more like 2,300.

Some of these fans will be approached by a man known to Bulls staffers only as "our friend, The Scalper." Ticket scalping probably isn't a problem for many minor league teams, but this character is lurking at most Bulls games. He's not allowed to peddle tickets right outside the ballpark, but he does so when no one from the team is around.

So Birling and Bishop make a point of roaming around in front of the ticket office before games if they don't have any other pressing duties. When The Scalper sees one of them, he casually walks away and tries to look like he's deep in thought. "We can't stop him from just standing there," Birling says. He comes and goes from in front of the ticket office depending on where they are.

Birling is standing outside the park, playing cat and mouse with The Scalper, when the first pitch is thrown. On the radio comes the voice of Matt DeMargel, the director of media relations and promotions, saying it came in at 89 miles an hour. This is relayed to staff members not because they care about the pitch, who threw it or what happened to it, but because it's part of a promotion. Guess the speed of the first pitch and win a prize.

But as Bulls righthander Jason Standridge's first pitch pops the catcher's mitt, Mary Beth Warfford and Kevin Crittendon don't even know it. The game is the last thing on the minds of those in the ticket booth, and standing in the room it would be impossible to know a game is going on just a long toss away. Warfford and Crittendon came to work for the Bulls as sales assistant because they want to land full-time jobs in baseball and have a chance to work around the game. But the closer they get to the game, the further away from the action end up. For an hour and a half on a busy night like this one, no one in the ballpark has a more hectic job. Every 10 seconds or so, one of the ticket sellers repeats the evening's mantra: "All we have left is Diamond View and lawn seating."

That means only seats in the outfield are still available. The ticket sellers all have computers set up to their right. A request for four seats leads to a couple of mouse clicks, and a couple of seconds later a special ticket printer spits out four tickets. As the line grows, section 128 disappears, click by click, from the computer screen as the system continually updates which tickets are available.

The line at the will call window also continues to grow, which causes Birling to furrow his brow. Lines are his personal pet peeve, so after he directs a few people to shorter lines, he can't help but get on the radio to Bishop: "Jon, what do you want me to do? Will call is getting really bad."

"All right, we'll just figure it out," Bishop radios back.

Birling stands back, behind all the lines, arms folded, watching over the next few minutes as the lines stubbornly refuse to dissipate. People are moving through the lines at a good pace, and no fans seem anything other than happy, but Birling is seething. He again radios to Bishop inside the ticket office, offering his assistance to get the lines moving faster. He's clearly the Type A personality in this pairing, while Bishop is more laid back.

"It's moving as fast as it possibly can, I promise you," Bishop says.

"The line is out to the street, so it must not be moving too fast," Birling shoots back.

But by 7:30 the line has dwindled, and there aren't many tickets left. With the busiest time over, someone turns up the radio broadcast of the game in the ticket office. Warfford is free to go back to her assigned job, checking tickets at the entrance to the luxury suite level, after being pressed into duty in the ticket office because a ticket seller was out with a death in the family.

"They have to be totally flexible and adaptable," Bishop says. "Kevin was supposed to be out of here at 5:30 p.m., but we asked if he could help out."