Friday’s Game A Sellout, Standing Room Only Still Available

and i’m rick cabrera. the el paso chihuahuas are less than three hours away from first pitch of their first- ever playoff series. the c-dogs are in fresno tonight for game one of the best-of-five pacific conference championship series. first pitch is at 8:05 p.m. the game can be heard live on 600 espn el paso. game two is scheduled for thursday night in fresno, before the series turns to el paso for game 3 on friday. abc-7’s darren hunt is live from downtown el paso with the latest on ticket sales … darren? rick and estela, according to the team web site, there are only a handful of scattered single seats remaining for friday’s game here … although we do expect the chihuahuas franchise to sell up to two to three thousand standing room only tickets at some point, likely starting this evening. with only 75- hundred seats in southwest university park, anything above eight thousand tickets sold is considered a sellout by team officials … although the ballpark has held more than 10- thousand on occasion. the five dollar lawn tickets are already sold out as well, with about 350 being snatched up quickly. so at this point, even though there are standing room only tickets to sell, they’re calling it a sellout. by contrast, there are still thousands of seats remaing for tonight’s game one and tomorrow’s game two in fresno. how rare is a sellout for a minor league baseball playoff game? chihuahuas g-m brad taylor told me earlier this week he’s never experienced a playoff sellout in 21 years of minor league baseball. “looks like you got you sellout, that’s a pretty big deal … yeah that speaks volumes about this town and how emotionally invested they’ve become in our team … its not an easy sell in minor league baseball, if you’ll look at the games that will take place tonight and the next couple of weeks, there’s not gonna be a lot of them that are gonna get the numbers we’re going to get here.” we’ve seen several people coming up here over the last hour or so to snatch up the last of the seats for friday’s game. you’ll hear from them, coming up at six. we’ll also talk about what it takes to get this ballpark ready for another sellout crowd, or two or three … when they didn’t know they were going to be in the playoffs until three days ago. rick and estela. from our minor league heroes … to a real life hero: “he turned something that was a scary situation into something really positive for him.” up