I'll give them credit for at least being willing to publicly acknowledge it as a PR problem and make something they think is an attempt to do something about it. The problem as always with them is the execution. I'd rather it just be a campaign where the team says, "we're going to take back out park." i.e. acknowledging it as a problem of their own making and doing the things they need to do over time to change the situation. Instead, they turned it into a call to action for the fans who didn't create the problem. And the answer is to offer people a chance to buy more tix to games they already don't want to go to? I'd rather they offer to buy back my Phillies tix so they can given them to neighborhood kids.
Also, the whole thing about offering it only to people from the area is clueless. It's a myth that the Phillies games are packed with people who drive in from Philly. A lot of STHs are Phillies, Mets, and Braves fans to begin with as a leftover from the freak up by MLB when they owned the team. And most of the Phillies fans in the stands over the years have been locals/transplants/college students.
The proper way to deal with this is a) put a better product on the field, b) market better to establish the local fanbase, c) coordinate an effort to get tix into the hands of local kids, d) put in a zero tolerance policy for Philly fan behavior at the ballpark via better security and aggressively tossing out and harrassing every Phillies fan in the place, and e) a general effort to make it as difficult as possible for Philly fan groups to coordinate anything.
By making it as miserable an experience for them as possible, you can suppress some of the attendance over time. But at the end of the day it comes down to putting a winner on the field and better marketing. They dug themselves a hole, and it will take a lot to dig out. Clearly, they are not willing to spend money to fix the problem, if the best they can come up with is to offer people the opportunity to give them more money by buying tix. They could make an investment and start refusing to serve alcohol to Phillies fans. That would suppress some of the crowd.
