baseball
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.
Hey, Guess what? The Supreme Court ruled properly on an intellectual property case.
Sensing a way to make even more money than it already does, Major League Baseball has tried to force people to start paying for their fandom by imposing licensing fees on “fantasy” baseball leagues to use major league players’ names and statistics. Happily for fans and free speech, Major League Baseball was tossed out of the game this week in the Supreme Court.
Read the entire NY Times article.
A virtually unknown stockbroker from San Jose, Calif., Don Odermann has spent 25 years as a silent baseball benefactor for Latino players.
Well, I’m not actually sure this blog title is entirely true, and that’s why I can freely publish it here. I found this 1887 baseball card on Shorpy’s Photo blog. It features the likeness of Chicago White Stockings first baseman Adrian C. Anson (also known as Cap Anson).
An early baseball card like this is in and of itself interesting to me, but it is far more amazing just how much history a seemingly inert object contains when coupled with a fascinating comment thread like the one following this image. You can find the comment thread here, and I will encapsulate what I learned from it below:
- Cap Anson was “(common for the era, even in his native Iowa) a bigot. His racial attitudes were stronger than most, however, and he led efforts to exclude blacks from professional baseball.”
- Which is followed by this fascinating bit: “Jackie Robinson was NOT the first black to play in the major leagues — both Fleet and Welday Walker played in 1884 before the color barrier limited baseball to the (ahem) melanin-impaired.”
- Lewis Ginter (of the Allen & Ginter’s Cigarette’s company) was a New Yorker who went to Richmond when he was 18 and became an extremely wealthy and powerful industrialist. Here’s a look at his profile from a user’s comment:
Ginter amassed a great fortune in the tobacco industry via new technology for rolling cigarettes. He used this massive fortune to act as a philanthropist and for the development of civic and business interests in Richmond. He developed the neighborhood Ginter Park and brought the Union Theological Seminary there. His niece Grace Arents continued his philanthropy, spurring the development of St. Andrew’s School, the Instructional Visiting Nurse Association and the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden at her home Bloemendaal.
Hired on to the John Allen & Co, he became a partner of the Allen and Ginter tobacco company that ushered in a number of innovations including cigarette cards and the use of local Virginia tobacco. In 1890 Ginter’s company joined forces with James B. Duke to form the American Tobacco Co..
- Cap Anson was the first member of the 3,000 hits club, and is currently 7th on the all-time hits leaders. he ended his career broke and in vaudeville (Confession: I learned about his standing on the all-time hits list and his vaudeville career from wikipedia.) There was a controversy surrounding whether or not he should be considered part of the 3,000 hits club given over 400 of his hits were made in the National Association, which some believed could not be considered a major league (see the wikipedia article here for more on this).
- Last, but certainly not least:
I don’t know how commonly known this is, but this photo illustrates the fact that baseball cards were originally introduced in cigarette packs in order to keep the cigarettes from bending over. When they later started getting popular with kids they were packaged with bubble gum.
Now, I’m gonna have to have the bava-factcheckers go over this list to make sure all these points are 100% accurate and absolutely airtight, so until they give the thumbs-up I just wanted to reflect just how amazing it is to see a 120 year old baseball card take on so many rich social, material, biographical, and political inflections. The comment matrix of other people brings this cultural artifact to life. Informal learning at its best and, as usual, it is spurred on by curiosity, connections, and serendipity, not the desire to “get educated,” so to speak.
Related posts on bavatuesdays
