Thread by @jedshug

More Kavanaugh credibility problems:
We still haven't answered the $200,000 of baseball ticket debt.
I think sports fans will agree: It still doesn't smell right.
It's not how I've experienced sports tickets with friends:
Ticket "debts" all getting called in at once? 1/

2/ Other fans may have a mix of experiences.
Here's ours: Growing up, my family would share season tickets - Orioles or Nats tickets - with a bunch of other families. Families always paid up front and divided those tickets up in a draft. It was a big deal and very clear.

3/ My experience: if you start the season with the expectation of sharing tickets with friends, you would actually divide up the tickets - and pay up front. If you didn't pay for the season's tickets, you weren't getting a real share or a draft spot.
You weren't in.

4/ I think it's wildly implausible that Kavanaugh had a group of friends who split season tickets, but for several years, he just happened to put the WHOLE bill on his credit cards, and never got paid back.
Like in law, sports ticket friend-debts have a statute of limitations.

5/ My version of the sports fan/friend norms on tickets:

A) If you offer a friend tickets to join you, it can be fuzzy. Both sides should specify if it's a gift or a face-value share, which is still generous. But if the offeror doesn't specify, it is understandably like a gift.

B) If you offer a friend to join you, you spend 3 or more hours together.
*If the tickets are a gift, the friend is supposed to offer to buy beers and food.
*If they are a split, then the friends will share beer and food runs, which take time.
*It's hard not to clarify this.*

C) What if you are offering a set of tickets, and you're not going?
*It depends on timing, and this can get tricky. If it's more than a few days in advance, the default is that the friend will pay face value.
*But if it's a day or two before, there is a gray area...

D) If you offer a set of baseball tickets within a 48-hour window, maybe it's because you can't use them, so maybe you're trying to find them a good home and you don't want them to go to waste. At some point, you need to clarify.

E) Here's the bottom line for Kavanaugh:
If you think these friends are supposed to pay you back for the baseball tickets, but they don't,
YOU STOP GIVING THEM TICKETS.
That's the norm, and that's also just common sense.

F) And if they don't pay you back, you have a statute of limitations to ask to be paid back:
That baseball season, or maybe the start of the next season.
You certainly DON'T GIVE THEM MORE TICKETS, or that's a waiver of the debt.

6. OK, all the way back to Kavanaugh: I don't think it's plausible that friends could have owed him $200,000 of debt over several years, or they are playing by some dramatically different rules than the rest of the normal world.
And those "rules" don't seem too kosher.

7. I can let others speculate about what's going on with all those tickets and all that cash, but there are lots of ways to change the estimated values of those tickets in either direction, lots of ways for people to pay for play in either direction, ways to double pay...

8. I'm not suggesting I know what actually happened.
But this $200,000 baseball ticket story is so shady, and I partly blame the Senate Democrats for whiffing on this problem.
But as long as we have more questions about Kavanaugh's credibility, I think there is still time to ask.