The Phillies are expected to announce sometime Monday that they plan to duplicate the free viewing party they held last Sunday night for Game 3 of the National League Championship Series between the Phillies and Dodgers. “We considered a couple of different locations,” Michael Harris, director of marketing and special projects, said Sunday night, the Red Sox-Rays game on in the background. “But we decided, why fix it if it isn’t broke, for lack of a better term. We had a fantastic turnout and actually received wonderful feedback from our fans, so it was really an easy and natural decision to replicate the template at Penn’s Landing.”

So fans are encouraged to come down as early as possible to the Great Plaza, located between Walnut and Market streets, where festivities are expected to be under way well before Game 1's first pitch is thrown at 8:35 p.m. Harris said he’s expecting capacity to cap out at around 2,000. “We probably won’t have room to accommodate everyone who wants to go down there,” Harris said.

Fans who arrive will find food and beverages, including beer, available for purchase. Unlike last week, they will not be allowed to bring in their own alcoholic beverages. The Phillies ballgirls will be there again, but this time the Phanatic will be unavailable. He'll have a more important duty: Torment the Rays players and support the Phils from his spot on the floor of Tropicana Field in Tampa .

The game will be broadcast on a 17’ by 27’ LED video display. Those who attend are encouraged to bring along blankets and chairs.

Harris said they’ve already decided not to hold a viewing party on Thursday night for Game 2. The series comes back to Philly for games Saturday, Oct. 25, through Monday, Oct. 27, then returns to Tampa for Game 6 on Oct. 29 and Game 7 on Oct. 30. There could be viewing parties for one or both of those games, and there’s a chance that Citizens Bank Park could serve as the host for those. With work ongoing to prepare the park for the weekend, going back to Penn’s Landing for Game 1 made a lot more sense. Plus, as Harris said, there are other reasons for sticking with the same site as the last time.

“Having it at Penn’s Landing allows us to integrate the fabric of the city in some fashion,” he said, “and again, the feedback was wonderful, so we decided to go there. And we’re just going to do it for Game 1. We definitely want to have something for the first game to signify and acknowledge the moment and it’s possible we’ll have another event if the series extends to Games 6 and 7. But we’ll just have to evaluate that and make a determination at a later date.”

The line is 500 or 600 deep at Forman Mills on Grant Avenue in the Northeast, a manager there said a few minutes ago, as Shane Victorino is there for a couple of hours to autograph Phillies merchandise. Chris Achilefu, the manager at the store, said by phone that he has sold around 5,000 Victorino jerseys the past two days. Victonirno is scheduled to sign through 8 p.m.

That's only been part of the run on Phillies merchandise since the team clinched the NL pennant last Wednesday night, when the store stayed open overnight to begin selling the NL champion merchandise. Achilefu said that the championship hoodies have been a particularly good seller, especially now that the temperatures have trended down, and that accessories such as necklaces, etc.

Meanwhile, at the Modell's Sporting Goods store in South Philly, Victorino merchandise has been moving as fast as he does circling the bases. A manager at the store on Snyder Avenue said at some point they expect to receive the dueling T-shirts that reflect the Phillies and their World Series opponent. But fans seems perfectly happy, he noted, to be purchasing any number of items that have the World Series insignia, an image of the World Series trophy in addition to saying "NL champions." Anything with Victorino's name on it, he said, is leading the way.

That World Series merchandise specific to Phillies vs. the AL champ could be in stores as early as tomorrow afternoon or evening, but more likely by Tuesday, still a day before Game 1 on Wednesday night in the American League city.

Part of the hunt for Red October is already under way in Philly, where StubHub.com reported that Phillies World Series ticket sales between midday yesterday and midday today increased 141 percent.

Mike Garvie, of TicketNetwork.com, said earlier today he saw about 1,400 available tickets listed for Citizens Bank Park for each of the three possible games here. StubHub was showing more than 2,500 tickets for Game 3 next Saturday. A comparatively new platform, ninjatickets.com, featured listings from several different secondary sites that, for Game 3 anyway, totaled 21 pages. Game 4, by the way, is next Sunday, Oct. 26, and Game 5 will be played here Monday, Oct. 27.

So what are tickets costing? On average, StubHub reported $822 for Games 3 through 5 in Philly. Get-in prices appear to be around $450, with the upper range going into the thousands of dollars. Tickets in Tampa seem to be selling on average about $260 cheaper than in Philly, around the cost of a round-trip AirTran flight from here to Tampa International Airport .

Garvie didn’t see the outcome of the American League Championship Series affecting prices too much. “I have the feeling if the Red Sox would find a way to win that Series, it might send the prices a little bit higher,” he said, “because that Boston-Philadelphia rivalry might be more of an attractive draw than a Tampa-Philadelphia series.”

He said the get-in price to Tropicana Field was $275, as compared to $600 to Fenway Park in Boston . Overall, the average price for World Series tickets in Tampa was $565 as of today and a little over $1000 for seats in Boston .

It’s hard to tell how soft the demand will be in Tampa , where the Rays averaged just over 22,000 despite occupying first place for much of the season. Only in the last month has the team really caught on in that market. Capacity at Tropicana Field is similar to Citizens Bank Park , around 45,000. StubHub was reporting that 2,500 tickets remained for Games 6 and 7 of the ALCS, scheduled to be played in Tampa, at an average price of $186 on Saturday and $179 on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the average price for Boston ’s three games in the ALCS was $257. But the Boston Globe was reporting in a Thursday story that playoff games at Fenway Park this postseason were “selling barely above face value, and sometimes less.” A field-box ticket that would have gone for $1800 in 2004 and $900 last year was selling for $300 for this series, only $25 above the face value. So maybe even that market would give Phillies fans a chance to root on their team in enemy territory. 

Sean Pate, of Stubhub.com, said that he expects to see two trends over the coming week as the remaining tickets are sold for the games here. Some will jump in now and buy what’s available, while others will wait to see if the lower-priced seats or standing room dip to their price point. “The market is setting itself right now,” he said earlier today. “It remains to be seen how low they will go.  I wouldn’t expect to see anything below $350.” Then, echoing Garvie, he added: “Now if the Red Sox were to come back and somehow win this series, that could change the price. You’d have Red Sox Nation in the mix and the more glamorous marquee series.”

A spokesman for the Phillies said today that all their tickets are taken. Not only did season ticketholders who wanted them receive the tickets back before the playoffs started, but an online lottery that could be accessed on the team's Web site is finished and the winners were notified yesterday by e-mail.

Should Philly stick around the $820 average price for a ticket, it would be somewhere in the middle of what it has cost the past five years to attend a World Series game. It will higher than what it cost to see the Cardinals ($627) and Tigers ($623) play in 2006 and the Cardinals ($721) in the 2004 World Series, but lower than the prices to see the Red Sox in 2004 ($1767) and 2007 ($1279), the Astros ($1135) and White Sox ($1421) in 2005, and the Rockies ($927) last year.    

In fact, the average price of a ticket for this World Series figures to be lower than any recent Series except for 2006.

Bottom line, it’s a big, big investment for a lot of folks, but on average the ticket price for this series comes pretty close to matching the cost of other league championships. For instance:

• The average cost of a ticket to the 2008 Stanley Cup finals between the Penguins and Red Wings was $531.
• The average cost of a ticket to the 2008 NBA Finals between the Celtics and Lakers was $773.
• Same for the 2008 NCAA Final Four in San Antonio , which was $655.
• Meanwhile, football is in its own league as far as where those ticket prices settle. The average price for this year’s BCS Championship between LSU and Ohio State was $1363.  
• And the Super Bowl trumps them all. All these numbers come from StubHub’s Pate, who noted that the average price of a ticket to see the Eagles and Patriots play in Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville in February 2005 was $2659. That number had increased appreciably for Super Bowl XLII between the Giants and Patriots, played in February in  Glendale , Ariz. That AVERAGE cost? $3540.   

You'll have a little more time to prepare to watch Game 6 of the World Series.

That game, set for Wednesday, Oct. 29, at the American League city, will start 15 minutes later after it was announced a bit earlier today that Sen. Barack Obama has purchased a half-hour of air time that CBS, NBC and Fox will pick up. Obama's prime-time "special" will run from 8 to 8:30 that night, with the game now scheduled to begin around 8:35.

Several media outlets are reporting that this decision will cost the Obama campaign close to $3 million to air the program on at least three networks. These reports noted that ABC has not immediately returned a message asking whether it too has now agreed to a buy, a move which would create an unprecedented roadblock of the nation's biggest commercial networks.

Game time Fox had originally been scheduled to start airing the baseball game at 8:20 p.m. The series will open next Wednesday in the American League city, either Tampa or Boston. Game 2 will remain there the next night before the series switches to Philly on Saturday night, Oct. 25. The series will continue in Philly on Oct. 26 and Oct. 27.

While you're out celebrating, you can stop in to several stores in the Philly metro area and buy some "NL champion" apparel overnight.

Modell's marketing manager Derrick Morgan said earlier today that its stores on Cottman Avenue in Northeast Philly and at Front Street and Snyder Avenue in South Philly will stay open "until they have nobody left in the building" to sell Phillies championship T-shirts ($24.99 for men's, $21.99 for kids) and caps ($20.99). Then every Modell's store in the Philly metro area will open at 6 a.m. with championship T-shirts and caps to sell. Morgan said more merchandise is anticipated to arrive [in the stores] by late this morning.

World Series apparel, of course, will have to wait for a winner in ALCS. "Once the other series is decided," Morgan said, "then they can start printing the other stuff, because they can do matchups, like Rays-Phils or Red Sox-Phils or whatever,then they start printing the World Series stuff. But the National League champ shirts do have a World Series logo on it."

Morgan said this copies something that Modell's stores have done in the past "with the Yankees, the Eagles, the Flyers, the Boston Celtics, the Red Sox. We've all been through this a zillion times."

And Modell's won't be alone. Chris Achilefu, the manager for the Forman Mills store at 2500 Grant Avenue, between the Boulevard and Academy Road, said his store will be open all night. Anyone coming in after 11 p.m. will be given a free T-shirt (not a NL champion Phillies, I should stress) and the first 50 customers after 11 o'clock also will get a hot dog. Achilefu said that the store will have NL champion T-shirts and caps for sale, and that anyone stopping in can sign up to win World Series tickets. The drawing will be held sometime later on next week.

Achilefu said his store was selected because it's the No. 1 Forman Mills in the region for sales of Philly sports merchandise.

Sports Authority stores in Lansdale, Exton, King of Prussia and Warrington on this side of the Schuylkill and also in Turnersville, N.J., are planning to open at 6 o'clock this morning.

Finally, the Phillies will open their Majestic Clubhouse Store at Citizens Bank Park at 8 a.m. today and begin selling National League Champion Phillies T-shirts and caps, the same worn by the players during their celebration in Los Angeles. The store's special postseason hours will be 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday. Phillies merchandising director Scott Brandreth wrote in an e-mail yesterday that "other NL Champs and World Series products would follow in a few days and continue to flow through and during the Series." 
 

ESPN 950 has been trying to juggle Phillies games throughout the postseason while also carrying games from the other series. Tonight it’s not a problem with just the Phil scheduled for an 8:22 p.m. start. The problem has been when other games have bumped up against either the start or finish of the Phillies games.

Assistant program director and talk-show host Joe DeCamara said a couple hours ago that the priority has been to carry the pregame and postgame shows ahead of a non-Phillies game. “We’re doing our best to air the ALCS as much as possible as long as it doesn’t interfere with Phillies pre and postgame shows and the [Mike] Missinelli show,” he said.

Tonight, they’re planning to feature Phillies icon Greg Luzinski on the latter portion of their pregame show, from Bott’s Italian Line restaurant in Swedesboro, N.J. That will start at 7 and continue up until the first pitch. DeCamara said that he and fellow host Jon Marks will pilot the postgame afterward and that if the Phillies clinch “and we’re getting tons and tons of phone calls, we’ll just go as long as people want to talk.”

They’re planning the same for Friday, if the series goes to Game 6. Mike Missanelli will take the reins of the pregame show starting at 3 p.m. and carry it right up until game time. Postgame will feature DeCamara and Marks and could go on “to 2 or 3 in the morning” if they clinch.”

Saturday night, DeCamara said, “gets trickier” if neither series has ended by then. Game 6 of the Rays-Red Sox is scheduled for late afternoon, with Game 7 of the Phillies-Dodgers set for an 8:22 p.m. start. He said they hadn’t made a decision yet on whether they’d carry the ALCS game, but “my guess is, and this is just a guess, we wouldn’t. It doesn’t make sense, because Boston-Tampa wouldn’t end until 7:30 or 8 and the Phillies game starts at 8:22. And if we’re facing a Game 7 of this series with the Phils, the whole town is going to be freaking out, so we’re going to want to have a Phillies pregame show.”

And if the Phils end tonight? Then the remaining games of the ALCS will be aired in their entirety on 950. 

Ticket prices for tonight's Game 5 in Los Angeles, in general, have nose-dived. Sort of like the Dodgers bullpen on Monday night.

What StubHub is terming a fire sale is under way out on the West Coast at this hour, as around 2,600 tickets remain and are selling for as low as $8. The average price for a ticket to tonight's game has fallen to $89, and that figure is expected to drop as more of those tickets sell for $10 and $20.

Sean Pate of StubHub wrote in an e-mail a few minutes ago that in his experience he's only seen the situation repeated once before: Last year for the Rockies-Diamondbacks series in Phoenix.

"[That series] saw some similar apathy for pricing," he wrote, "but that’s the only other one that’s in the ballpark. I would expect that from the [fans there], who aren’t [as] loyal or devout, but the Dodgers' prices have really surprised me.  This is a market that routinely shells out hundreds per ticket to see USC and the Lakers, but baseball just isn’t driving high prices this year."

The same is happening up north in Boston, although not quite to the same extreme. Pate said they are seeing the lowest tickets for a Boston postseason game in a generation, with tickets going for as low as $65 for standing room at Fenway Park tomorrow night. Where the average price for last year's ALCS games vs. the Indians at Fenway was $448, that price for Game 5 tomorrow is $225 and dropping. Pate said some of it is just a market that's seen its share of postseason games and success, from the Red Sox to the Patriots to the 2007-08 champion Celtics. "So it's no surprise that it's come down a bit."

As has been reported through the week, those average prices for potential NLCS and World Series games at Citizens Bank Park have been hovering, awaiting the results of tonight's game. The average price for Game 6 is $253, but Pate said that figure likely would rise tomorrow as the demand picks up for what would be a possible clinching game. About 1,700 tickets remain. Average prices for Game 7 are $241, and those are expected to take a pretty big jump Saturday for the same reason.

The average price to see the Phillies in the World Series on Saturday, Oct. 25, through Monday, Oct. 27, is $873, according to StubHub. In care you are curious, that figure for the four potential games at Tropicana Field is $587.

"I don't see the opponent having much to do with it," he said. "Even if it's Tampa, Phillies fans don't care. They just want to be there."

A look also at ticketnetwork.com shows tickets for Game 3 on Oct. 25th range from $491 for standing room to $4855 apiece for three seats in Section 120. 

Well, Game 4 did one thing besides move the Phillies to a game away from a spot in the World Series. It also kept the average price of tickets lower than at any of the other three venues.

Average ticket prices for Game 4 were $102, and they are the same for Game 5 tomorrow night, according to StubHub's daily report. In fact, the average price of a ticket for the three games at Dodger Stadium is down to $114. In fact, the lowest priced ticket was for $5 to Game 3 for a spot in the upper deck. A number of seats are going for below face value, in the $16 to $20 range.

Meanwhile, neither the quantity (around 3,400) nor the average price ($252) has changed much at all for a possible Game 6 at Citizens Bank Park on Friday night.

In the other series, Game 4 tickets for tonight's game at Fenway Park are averaging $248, and Thursday's Game 5 tickets are sititng at $236.

Ticket prices for the three potential World Series games in Philly, scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 25, Sunday, Oct. 26, and Monday, Oct. 27, have sold for an average of $869. That's higher than Tampa and Los Angeles by a couple hundred dollars, and more than 100 dollars below the aveage price of a ticket for the four possible games at Fenway Park in Boston.