Remember when going to a baseball game was all about, well, the baseball game? The diamond raison d’être. It was all about the home team, the players, the plays, the strategies, the umpires’ calls. It’s what you cheered, yelled, celebrated, cursed and booed about. And hot dog hawkers helped. That was old-school interactive.
Not quite like that anymore. Even Fenway and Wrigley have made major concessions.
I was reflecting on this while noting the Rays incipient search for a “next generation ballpark.” While most attention is focused on a site, funding, partnerships, population centers and transit options, the Rays have also made it clear that there’s another priority. Their post-Trop home will have to cater to 21st century baseball fans.
According to team officials, the new facility will “need to have a collection of intimate neighborhoods within the ballpark.” In stadia-speak, that means plenty of bars and galleries, where fans can congregate while still in sight of the action as well as ever more sophisticated “fun zones” for kids. It’s also a given that technological bells and whistles–think unlimited smart-phone-app scenarios–will be part of the generational repackaging.
Some personal context.
Back in the late 1990s, I was living near Atlanta and took my mother to Turner Field to catch a Braves-Mets game. She was a baseball fan dating back to the 1950 “Whiz Kids” days of the Philadelphia Phillies. My dad played on Army base teams with several future members of the Phillies and hard-core Phillie fandom was forever cemented.
Back to the Ted. By about the third inning, we had both noticed a pattern. At any one time, no more than about a third of the crowd was seated. Concession stands with regional treats and interactive inflatable games were the draw.
Little did we know that we were witnessing an evolving new normal. Fans don’t just show up and root and banter about the game. They put it on cruise control and pivot out of their assigned seating.
We also noted a protocol change.
Baseball is a relatively pedestrian game. There are all kinds of predictable breaks in the action: between pitches, between batters, between innings. But that had no bearing on the “Excuse me-heads up-watch it” chorus of those continuously recycling for fried chicken, Bud Lights or local hookups. Beyond annoying if you were there to actually, well, see the game.
Then there was a play in the 6th inning that galvanized our attention. It was a scoreless game. A Braves’ runner was called out while trying to steal second base. It was close. The batter had just missed strike three and the throw was in time. A classic “strike-him-out/throw him out” highlight play.
But the runner may have gotten a hand in before the tag was applied on his thigh. I prided myself on pointing that out to my mother who said: “Let’s see what the (scoreboard) replay shows.” Indeed.
Now this was before formal challenges and call reversals, but there were still highlight replays. This surely was one. Only problem: You only get so much time between innings, and everything had been pre-programmed: from advertisements to a trivia contest. No time to show the “strike-him-out/throw-him-out” play. It was merely a highlight–not a revenue-producing ad or a form of interactive fan fun.
We looked at each other, excused ourselves to pass the one fan in our row, did our seventh-inning stretching at the concession stand and headed back to Marietta. I forget who won. Didn’t matter then either.
And little did we know. We hadn’t simply been watching a baseball game. We had been part of an experience.
One that is still evolving.