MLB Stadiums Without Crowd Noise?

There’s a point in any game where everything changes. Every player feels it. It’s when the crowd is so loud, player’s emotions and abilities swing on a dime, for better or worse. That’s exactly what players compete for, that rush, the roar of the crowd, the adulation to prove they’ve done something great or are important people. So, can you imagine NFL, NBA or NHL games played in empty stadiums? Major League Baseball may be headed that way.

The current average length of a Major League Baseball game is 3:02, of which only eighteen minutes is actual action, meaning there’s almost three hours of non-action. The current human attention span average is eight seconds, one second less than a goldfish. (And, yes, these figures come from credible research study).

Can you imagine a kid today going to his first live baseball game? He’s used to thrill-a-minute stimulation from his device, or television, or anything nowadays. The kids of this and future generations are tomorrow’s MLB fans – also known by team owners as “fannies in the seats,” the people who pay most of the player’s salaries.

But wait, young people aren’t the only ones distracted by modern-day living and technology.

The average worker today checks his email thirty times an hour. Typical mobile users check their phones 150 times a day. From 2011 to 2013, social media sharing doubled.

This is trouble for MLB. Look at the trends. The average length of an MLB contest in 1980 was 2:39, and we had far fewer distractions then. With the average 2014 MLB ticket price at $27.93, plus expensive concessions, plus travel time, plus the fact the game is available on cable, one might ask why go to baseball games at all?

Rob Manfred, MLB Commissioner, says he realizes these problems and is implementing new rules this season to speed up play to lure younger fans. No more forty-five seconds between pitches for batters to readjust their jock strap or pitchers to circle the mound two times. That’s just enough time to tempt fans to reconnect with friends, co-workers and social media outlets on their devices. Or just time to get bored, and the stadium goes quiet again.

Anyone who thinks crowd noise isn’t crucial to the excitement of sports is wrong. The NFL’s Atlanta Falcons were recently fined for pumping crowd noise into their stadium during games the past three seasons. Anyone who thinks the attention span issue isn’t crucial to sports is also wrong. The NFL has had to implement rules and fines for players and coaches from texting during games. It’s a different world today.

Major League Baseball’s official Opening Day game is April 5 in Chicago’s old Wrigley Field, ironically a night game. In 1988, Wrigley was the last MLB franchise to install stadium lights for night games.

I worry what MLB stadiums will look like in another twenty-seven years.

P.s.  The solution here in northern New Mexico: Go to our Triple A Albuquerque Isotopes games. Bring all your kids. Leave all devices behind. Baseball is too beautiful a game to miss.

Dad

(The kid on the left – whoever he is in this video – is a dead ringer for me on my first ever bowl.)

 

If there was one thing my father liked, it was bowling.

On the night he drove the family to the bowling alley for the very first time when I was ten, I asked why he chose duckpin bowling over up-and-coming tenpin bowling.

“Tenpins are easy. They’re big and tall – anyone can knock them down. Duckpins are short, stout and elusive – now those take skill to hit.”

Dad may have been right, but to me, tenpins would be much more fun, like knocking a burly, sexy Marlon Brando down when duckpins seemed closer to striking Ethyl Merman off her stride, if such a thing was possible. But, since Dad wanted to show us how to bowl, not to mention get out of the house for a change, I was all for it.

Once at the alley, the first thing I learned from Dad was that the other five people in my family also got to bowl. After I rolled my first two balls in the gutter, then clipped off the ten pin in the far left corner on my third, I reached for a fourth ball. Dad interrupted with, “Others in the family bowl, too. And you only get three balls.”

I wondered if my composite first frame score of “1” was anything to get excited about. “That’s very good for somebody’s first try,” Mom said, which I knew meant “1” really stunk.

Dad rose to bowl next. In the same way he lined up two by fours against the blade before sawing wood, Dad stared down the old, chipped wooden pins before making his first move. Silently, like a well-oiled machine, he took three evenly paced steps and fired the ball. The gray-black sphere clung to the lane’s far edge when, like magic, it curved to the middle. Then, pow. The Brunswick cannonball not only knocked all ten pins down, but the collision sounded like a factory of porcelain dolls had just blown up. How many pins did Dad just bust? And when do I get to bowl next?

Waiting for Mom to bowl, then my older siblings Cathy, Don and Doug, was no fun, but I took it like a man and patiently sat on my hands until Dad said, “You’re up. Remember – follow through.”

I didn’t know what follow through meant, but assured myself it was something akin to “throw the ball hard, then follow it with your eyes.” Following Dad’s advice, I not only took three steps to launch my rolling rocket, but fifteen.

“You fouled,” Dad said, referring to the red light that signaled my foot foul to the entire bowling center. I thought this egregious error was as good an excuse as any to use for getting an0ther gutter ball.

Pressure was mounting. I’d used four balls to amass one measly point.  Still, my hopes were high. My time was coming. I could see a strike on the horizon. No foot fouls – just exploding pins and lots of porcelain dust.

Toss number five was right down the middle, but started to curve, barely hugging the alley’s edge, before finally settling in Gutter City, its final resting place on the fringe of town.

“What?! Oh, come on-n-n-n,” I whined at the pins.

I couldn’t flub up like this again. My reputation as a fairly coordinated kid was on the line.

I fired my ball right down the middle, one that stayed there until impact. But, what? No strike? Instead, I received the duck pin menu specialty from hell, the all-too-familiar, overdone “chop.” Only two pins were knocked away from my straight on roll. “Shit. You bitch!” I yelled at them.

Uh-oh. I’d never used those words in front of Mom and Dad before. But walking back to the bench, expecting the worst, no one said a thing. Perhaps they couldn’t hear me. In dodging this bullet, and knew I better cool it.

Being last on the scorecard and watching everyone else get occasional spares, I shrunk lower in my bench seat with each frame. Dad’s praise was going to everybody else. I might as well be at home, quietly assuming the submissive posture I usually took in the family pecking order.

Then Don got a strike. Then Doug. Then the clowns bowling in the two lanes next to us blasted strikes. If I didn’t show up now, I was nothing.

Desperate, loose, and dangerous, I let it fly. Before I knew it, every pin disappeared from sight.

I jumped, fist-pumped and spun around. With jaw clenched, I swaggered to the bench, looking into my father’s eyes, as if to say, “Ev’ry goddam pin iz down, you bitches! Yes!”

From being in this new place called a bowling alley, I learned to be animated, that I could be animated, and that I sorely needed to express myself.

Sometimes it’s not what a father says, or does, or promises. It’s as simple as where he takes you.