My Ballpark Experience

Recently, I attended three professional baseball games. That is more baseball for me than I have experienced since my child played for the high school. That child is the reason I was broiling at the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati. He was hired to work for the Reds for the summer and my wife and I had come to spend a weekend visiting him – and to watch the Reds play the Chicago Cubs. 

Disclaimer: I have never been a sports fan or a sports player. I haven’t been much of any kind of game player. While I can be quite competitive, it was more about achievements in other areas than athletics. Everyone else in my family is a sports person, so I have experienced tennis, volleyball, basketball, and baseball far more than I would choose if it hadn’t been important to people I love. I truly never really cared about who won or lost, except that I knew that the people I lived with would be happier if their teams prevailed. So I fought my instincts and cheered – quietly.

I am not sure how long it has been since I have been to a professional baseball game. The last time I remember going was taking my son and his friends to Wrigley Field to celebrate his birthday eight years ago. So I wasn’t fully prepared for my experience.

We arrived a little more than an hour before the game was scheduled to start for our first game. We went directly to our seats and sat down and started to sweat profusely. The field was a patchwork of billboards and electric signs. There were two enormous jumbotrons which were framed by dozens of smaller signs, some of which were electronic and others looked like billboards. There was preparatory activity on the field, but that was very far away.

Everything at the ballpark has a sponsor. Everything is a commercial. Every announcement was brought to me by someone wanting to sell me something. Much of the game was sponsored. Strikeouts were sponsored. Insurance companies sponsored insurance runs. Although the players’ uniforms did not have commercial logos on them, everything else did!

The ballgame experience was ADD writ large. If I didn’t want to watch the game, I could watch all the activity on the two big screens or the smaller screens. The big screens were often broken into smaller segments that displayed statistics, lists, photographs, logos, and smaller moving images. They were like my home computer screen with many tabs and windows open.

Before the game and in breaks throughout it, there were little ceremonies and events. At each of the games, the first pitch happened twice. Someone else brought out the official ball. They honored veterans, first responders, recently deceased benefactors, and charitable organizations. They gave awards. They asked the fans to donate to causes. Before and during each game, many people were honored for many reasons.

The ballgame experience is also steeped in tradition and nostalgia. The ballpark was celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the team. There were people dressed in “retro” uniforms and a great deal was made of the history of the team. The Hall of Fame was next door, too. The singing of the national anthem was also very important. Everyone stands up, but no one sings except the singer. They even released an eagle, who flew from the bleachers to a trainer by the pitcher’s mound!

Baseball moves slowly. It takes the pitcher a while to get ready for each batter. It takes each batter a while to come out from the dugout and stand in front of the plate. Many of the batters don’t stand there long but need to take short breaks between each pitch. Things inch along. But the music fills every gap. There is an organ that plays a variety of involvement music. Much of the organ music seems designed to keep me engaged. The music asks me to clap, yell “charge,” snap my fingers, or sing along. Sometimes the lyrics are on the screen and it the stadium becomes one big karaoke.

There is also recorded music. Almost all of it is from my childhood. While there was some use of more contemporary music, it had a very different place. Beach Boys hits, “Kodachrome,” “We Will Rock You,” and even some movie themes would play almost as often we would hear the organ. Sometimes, it was just the recording of hands clapping the open rhythm from “Centerfield” or the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night.”

The screens did show the action, replays, and frequently panned the crowd. There were a series of  “cams” throughout the game. I knew about the kiss cam. Audience members saw themselves on the big screens, expressed their surprise and perhaps delight at being the center of attention for a few seconds and then gave some a big kiss. All of these couples were typical heteronormative couples. I saw no same-sex kisses on the kiss cam. There were other cams, too. There was a chicken dance cam, a floss cam, a “nugget” cam (children) and a few others that confused me. There were a lot of times when the people on the screen just waved or tried to take photos of themselves on the jumbotron.

Often the people on the screen were children. Sometimes, the children got to say, “play ball” or somehow participate in the game in some superficial way. Several times, a broadcaster would have a fan on the screen play a game. There were always prizes for these games that the fans would win regardless of their success. There was a matching game that the audience could play along with. Sometimes the games on the screen were for all of us: trivia, an odd form of shell game, and identifying famous players.

The technical skill involved in all the graphics and camera and high tech entertain was very impressive. Things moved to the music, raced across the park, dazzled, and amazed! Twice each game, a supped up golf cart came out and shot little toy baseballs into the stands as if from an automatic machine gun revolving around the top of the cart. There were smoke and sound and the cart was decked out like a monster. Everyone jumped to get these little padded baseballs. One even fell next to us and my wife gave it to the little boy sitting near us who looked like he might have hopped over the railing to get it!

And there is the food. Everyone is eating and drinking all the time. There are peanut shells all over the ground, which is already sticky with the drippings of the beer, pop, and melted ice cream. People come up the aisles to sell pretzels the size of dinner plates, beer, pop, or other goodies. Inside the ballpark is a “concourse” that looks like the food court of a huge shopping mall. The lines are long and the prices are high and people are stuffing their faces with pork, hot dogs, barbeque, pizza, nachos, sweets, and tons of other fattening foods. In fact, unlike other entertainment events, people are constantly leaving their seats and returning with food. There was no moment where everyone was seated and looking at the game. This was not like any theater. There were even lines to get to the food stalls as the game finished.

The players themselves figure strongly into the flavor of the park. They are announced multiple times. The Cubs, who were the visiting team, are featured with simple photos and lists of statistics. The Reds, however, each have a theme song and a video each time their name is mentioned. Their music was often recent and reflective of their ethnic heritage. I wondered if the player himself picked this music.

The people around us were very involved in the game. They yelled and screamed about their favorite players. They were very free with their opinions about everything from the umpires to the uniforms to each other. I felt like I was sitting in an episode of “Rosanne.” When I photographed my wife from a far distance, the people around here were far more interested in what she was texted on her phone than the game!

There were three mascots who were often on the field. They might race or dance and interact with people. They were around the park as well and people were eager to be photographed with them. There was a lot of photography, but very little of it seemed aimed at the game itself.

My son spent much of his time in what was called the Fanzone. This was a place where fans, primarily under the age of ten, could participate more actively in baseball activities. There was a whiffle ball field, a playground, batting cages, a slide, a virtual reality simulator, and several carnival-like booths where you win prizes for making a basket or throwing a ball through a hole or knocking something over.

Somewhere in all this was a baseball game.