Rockies Finally Sell World Series Tickets

What was it like for the lucky few who made it through technical difficulties and the massive crush of Rockies fans trying to get in?

"It's like the Holy Grail of Jesus. No one has ever looked at it. No one has ever touched it."

While the lucky ones remained astonished at their good fortune, computer experts didn't appear to be buying the Rockies' "external malicious attack" explanation for the ticketing debacle yesterday:

The Colorado Rockies' online ticketing system probably fell victim to a lack of computer "horsepower" and was not the target of an outside attack as the Rockies insist, computer experts said.

On Monday, the Rockies offered a terse explanation for the ticketing system's crash, saying that the team and fans had been victims of an "external malicious attack."

On Tuesday, Rockies spokesman Jay Alves again leveled the "malicious attack" charge without offering details.

But computer and Internet security experts said that Monday's computer crash and the system's less-than-smooth performance Tuesday pointed to a shortage of capacity on the computer servers powering the system — or a failure to balance out traffic across those servers.