"I don't want to be out here, but I have no choice," he said, flapping his sign at the fans wheeling into the stadium. He kept his tickets under a Dodger hat and his eyes peeled for the police. "I'm just trying to get my money back."
Damon blamed the tanking economy and the fact that the Dodgers dropped the first two games of the series, a deficit that dampened buyer enthusiasm.
Dan Rubendall, founder of a La Canada online vendor called Zigabid, agreed. He told of a price-hammering glut of tickets for resale -- 4,000 or so.
"The market was average at best until they were down 2-0," Rubendall said. "There are so many tickets out there. . . . It's horrible."
Street prices slid as Sunday's game drew closer and closer, and as the police began popping up on the corners.
"They don't make it any better," said Damon, who had just received a cellphone call reporting two arrests on the other side of the stadium. "The undercovers are out today."
He skipped across Elysian Park Avenue to make a sale at an idling sedan. All along the block, his colleagues called out at the passing cars, "Need tickets?" . . . "Who wants field level?" . . . "How much you wanna spend?"
"I pretty much know all the undercovers," said Damon, who has been scalping for 15 years. He declined to say how many times he had been arrested or cited, but acknowledged that he got pinched last season after selling to a white-haired decoy couple.
Murphy said the volunteers undergo vetting by the department before they're deployed. Without them, he said, it would be tough to stay a step ahead of the scalpers.
"Undercover officers get burnt really quickly," he noted. "You can only arrest the same person once."
Arrests are up this Dodger season -- 64 compared with 49 in 2007. But jailing scalpers isn't a long-term fix.
"The challenge for us is that this is a $100 bail" offense, Murphy said. "We'll book them, and they'll pay the $100 bail and be out in an hour."
Jack Ross, a 22-year-old UC Berkeley student from Santa Monica, was more brazen than most of the scalpers Sunday, standing in the street and waving a fistful of tickets at the traffic.
"I'm not really worried about getting busted," said Ross, who began scalping tickets four years ago. "I pick out a game here and there."
He said he netted $700 reselling tickets for the only home Dodgers-Cubs playoff game, but figured to lose about $300 on the Phillies series. He bought eight tickets for each game.
With the surplus of scalper supplies, Ross said, "everything just backfired."
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paul.pringle@latimes.com
