All sacrilege aside as we celebrate the grand old ballpark’s 100-year anniversary, but enough with the phony baloney sellout streak at Fenway Park.

If you truly believe the Red Sox have honestly sold out more than 700 games in a row at Fenway, dating all the way to 2003, then you haven’t only sipped the Kool-Aid, you have chugged it.

The official stats show an almost nine-year sellout streak, but anyone who knows anything about the business of professional sports knows this is as meaningless a stat as you’ll find.

If by “sellout” you mean a measure of true market demand, rather than behind-the-scenes manipulation of ticket inventory, then there is no real sellout streak – nor has there been one for years at Fenway.

I’ll be honest here. I don’t have any “Deep Throat” inside the Sox ticket office telling me what the real numbers are.

But one doesn’t need secret sources to figure this one out, just common sense.

Typically as much as 70 percent of the Red Sox ticket inventory is sold months before Opening Day to companies, individual season ticket holders and ticket resellers. While there are a few average fans thrown in, the majority of seats are going to folks with the resources to lay out thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars on baseball tickets during the gloomy days of winter.

For this crowd, it’s all about entertaining guests and showing off your clout with prized Sox tickets. Who actually wins on any particular night is just part of the backdrop.

Essentially, it’s about rubbing elbows, not keeping score.

So that leaves the Sox with just 30 percent of the smallest ballpark in baseball to sell out during home games – roughly 10,000 seats or so.

And those seats are targeted as well by ticket brokers, who will snap up bleacher seats with hopes of turning them around for a nice profit, at say, $150 for a Yankees game.

Backup Systems

So let’s face it, selling out a fraction of tickets at baseball’s tiniest ballpark is not exactly an Olympian feat.

But here’s where claims of constant sellouts start to look really bogus.

To have a true sellout streak, there has to be at least the possibility of failure, of sales simply falling short on game night.

But you have to hand it to hedge fund billionaire John Henry and his other Red Sox co-owners – they didn’t become some of the savviest sports investors on the planet for nothing. And so thanks to current Red Sox ticket policies, there is no possibility of failure.

First, the Sox long ago dropped the pretense of battling ticket resellers.

The team in 2007 inked a corporate sponsorship deal with Ace Ticket, bringing Boston’s most prolific reseller into the corporate fold. Like any company sponsor, Ace gets an allotment of tickets to use as it sees fit.

Beyond that, exactly how the team’s deal with Ace works has always been murky, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out the possibilities here.

Year-in and year-out, Ace winds up with a multimillion-dollar stash of Sox tickets before Opening Day. Directly or indirectly, the Sox are offloading a big chunk of their ticket inventory before the season’s first pitch, rendering meaningless the whole idea of a sellout streak.

But that’s not all. There is one final line of defense that in and of itself negates the whole concept of a sellout streak. On those occasions where even the ticket resellers fail to come through, the Sox can simply give seats away and still call it a sellout.

The team, according to one account, doesn’t distinguish between paying customers and freebies – apparently all are conveniently the same for purposes of keeping the sellout streak alive.

Rooting For The End

But the issue here is not just a phony sellout streak, but really the nature of pro sports itself, here in Boston and worldwide.

Sox games at Fenway are becoming an increasingly corporate affair, with long-time fans – and grassroots passion – slowly squeezed out by rising prices and ever-expanding luxury seats.

And as prices move relentlessly upward, the sellout streak is just more front office propaganda aimed at getting fans to fork over money for baseball’s priciest tickets – and feel grateful for the opportunity.

Judging from the comment boards on articles and blogs speculating on whether the Fenway sellout streak may be winding to a close, it feels like fans are starting to sour on this.

And it’s not hard to see why. The only thing this sellout streak does is enable management to raise ticket prices even more. So if you are a true fan or even a casual fan and want to be able to afford going to a game, root for the sellout streak to end. Trust me, there are still going to be hundreds of folks outside waiting for tickets on game day.

Don’t get me wrong. Henry and his gang have gone a remarkable job reviving Fenway Park and transforming the Sox from perpetual also-rans into perennial contenders, recent stumbles aside.

But it’s time to pull the plug on the phony sellout streak and give fans a break.

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com