A while ago, I made my first trip to Comerica Park, the stadium where my beloved Detroit Tigers play their home games. I say “play their home games” because to me, Tiger Stadium will always be their true home, even if in the future it’s left only partially standing. I grew up about an hour from the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and my trips to that grimy cathedral were always something special. The place was beautifully disgusting, crusted with the cheers (and spit) of generations of faithful. Above all, it had character so palpable that it didn’t matter if half your view of the field was obstructed.
Tiger Stadium 
photo credit: hassgocubs
I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.
So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.
Comerica Park photo credit: kw111786
As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.
Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.
Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.
The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.
Comerica Park Scoreboard photo credit: McPhloyd
One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.
At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.
Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.
At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.
The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.
Great post, Luke. I can imagine a great English 101 writing assignment coming out of this kind of thing — ask students to go to an event (sports, music, theater) and decode and analyze the marketing messages they receive along with the ostensible “content” of the show.
Although you’re careful in this post to acknowledge that, in the old Tiger Stadium, “there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption,” I think it’s worthwhile to point out that the ties between baseball and advertising run so deep that they might well be inseparable. Here are a few links to check out:
AMNH: “Enterprise and Opportunity”
BERA: “The Business of Basball”
ESPN: “The tangled Web of Sports and Advertising”
Now, I’m not arguing with your contention that recent changes in technology (and new stadiums) have intensified the advertising “pitch” at the ballpark. But I would say that the purity of which you speak was only made possible by an earlier form of information filtering that was much stronger than you remember it to be.
Anyone else hungry for a Reggie bar?
Reply to Matt
Sure, there was never any totally ad-free purity in the past; the fences in every old ball park I’ve ever seen were certainly plastered with ads. There were always sponsors logos here and there. That said, what’s happening today does in fact amount to something that is different in kind, not only in style or degree. We probably face less copmmercial interruption when watch on TV for goodness sakes. Succinctly put, today we are screamed at. We are bludgeoned and bullied and assaulted.The advertising nightmare I endure in ballparks makes me feel suckered because it turns out I just paid (a lot) to be advertised to. The excess also cheats the game and insults the intelligence of spectators. There is stuff going on while the batter isn’t swinging, and it is part of baseball too. By revving up the disgustingly loud and intrusive ad-track between each pitch, we’re getting the following message: “Dear fans, we assume your childlike attention spans can’t manage a few seconds or minutes of time on your own, so we’ll try to do our best to give you something (inane and exploitative) to look at while you wait.” Finally, take note of this next time you’re at a ballpark; it’s something that really makes me sad: whenever the action stops, look around — what you will see are thousands of eyes turning as if trained to the images and sounds selling something. What isn’t happening at this point? Oh, just little things like talking to your children, your wife, your friends. I know it’s an old story about how we’re all alone together in post-modernity, but that doesn’t make it any less depressing.
Reply to Ryan
Wow, this is a beauty of a post. And I really like the way you frame the ballpark experience as one of media literacy. I can’t help but agree with both Matt and Ryan, sports have always exploited advertising to the nth degree but there does seem to be a subtle difference of kind (maybe subtle is the wrong word here
). The idea of space and the new ballparks being built recently is a fascinating one to me. The stadium in Detroit resembles in many ways Camden Yard, Turner Field and Safeco Park, just to name a couple of the newer parks. There seems to be a design at stake that in many ways changes how we watch the game, which Ryan suggest takes the moments when there is downtime and trains you to look elsewhere.
I wonder what the new Yankee stadium will be like, because while so much of what you talk about was always in evidence at the greatest stadium in the world, I would be interested in seeing how the design of the new park changes the dynamic of seeing and reading the game.
Oddly enough, I discovered this post right after watching the first two episodes of Season 3 of The Wire, the first one shows Camden Yard and Jimmy’s wife with a lawyer dude with expensive seats behind home plate –how does class work into this new ballpark with all the special seating arrangements and corporate boxes? While watching it I really wanted to go to a game, but as I read this I tend to agree that sometimes watching it on the TV is far less annoying. The public spaces have become truly assaulting, and the idea of a ballgame that doesn’t cost one a couple of hundred dollars for a family, no less the endless intake of corporate messages, is, indeed, depressing. The public has surrendered any sense of dignity in its shared public experiences, so much so that we even go through those moments alone (echoing Ryan’s point here). We can’t help but sell everything, and the idea of design, advertising real estate, and the decline of all that is holy in America’s favorite pastime is yet another foreboding sign that we, to quote Jay-Z’s Lucifer, “gotta get our soul right!”
Reply to Jim
Thanks for the comments, guys. Jim, that’s an interesting reference to perhaps the most talented rapper of our time, who expends great energy saying practically nothing of consequence (and, I would add, is instrumental in trying to bring his basketball team to a behemoth development in the neighborhood whose transformation you bemoaned in our other conversation). The parallel with HOVA is interesting because baseball is being played at such a high level now that it’s a crying shame that all the bullshit around the game distracts attention from what’s happening on the field.
Yankee hater that I am, I’m glad I got to go to see a few games there, but really don’t see what’s so great about that stadium as it currently stands. Sure, its history gives it an aura similar to what I wrote about Tiger Stadium above, even surpassing it, but that aura is tough to see through the haze of captivity. The Yankees, frankly, are Microsoft, and are now being run by a cretin who had the temerity to suggest that the National League was destroying the game by not adopting the DH.
I recently went to see the Newark Bears, of the Independent League, play a Friday night game at their nice little ballpark. An interesting experience; looking at the rosters, most of the guys in this league are veritable Moonlight Grahams, having had a cup of coffee in the big leagues, and, for some reason, not stuck. The game was played at a high level, and the stadium was about half-full. Between each half-inning, a guy went into the crowd with a mic to quiz fans with Jersey trivia, led potato-sack races on the field and other novelty games, and hurled repeated insults at the Governor. It was annoying — though no where near as bad as what we see in the majors — and reflective of the point Ryan is making above that it’s just nearly impossible for baseball front offices to let fans sit in peace and take in the beauty of the park.
I’ll note here, also… the Tigers are climbing up the AL Central.
And, here’s more on the death of Tiger Stadium from my favorite blogfather.
Reply to Luke