Andre Ethier jammed the pinky on his right hand during batting practice and was scratched from the lineup. Garret Anderson moves into his place…

On a happier note, by the time this blog posts to Facebook, we’ll probably be at 200,000 fans so nice work, people! We’re about 30 fans short but it never ceases to amaze me how many people out there love the Dodgers. Just looking around the ballpark here in SD tells you that.

And as a response to 636566cy’s post about tickets to the Yankees series, I’m glad you asked about why we aren’t putting individual tickets on sale. Here’s the deal.

Every year, for games like Opening Day and the Postseason, we offer our Season Ticket holders the opportunity to purchase additional seats prior to the public on sale. It’s a very common practice for sports teams across the country. As we stated in our news release, the volume of requests that we’ve already received from our season ticket holders has been extremely high. Obviously there are a lot of people who want to come to this series. While we have Opening Day every year and we’ve been fortunate enough to be in the postseason in four of the last six, the Yankees don’t come to down that often. Demand for these tickets is quite large.

At this point, we can already tell that once we give those season ticket holders the opportunity and take care of our internal ticketing needs, there will not be seats available to put on sale for the public. We obviously can’t sell what we don’t have and we have to take care of those who commit to season seats.

A side benefit that this also helps assure is that we will have Dodger fans in the house for those three games and that the ticket brokers won’t snap up every seat in the house. If we were to put them on sale to the individual public, I think it’s fairly safe to say that an enormous portion of those seats available would wind up on eBay or other such sites and begin selling for four or five times face value, if not more. And a huge portion of the people who will buy them will be Yankee fans in Los Angeles, whereas Dodger fans are much more interested in seeing seven games over the course of the season.

The seven-game plans start for as little as $9 per game, or $63 for an entire week’s worth of games. We believe that’s a very fair price, and there are plenty of other options, too (including some that have food included in the right field pavilion).

I hope that helps you understand the reasoning behind our approach…and now here’s to another win tonight in San Diego! First pitch is a minute away…