Hey! You Missed A Grand Slam!

Watch the crowd at any Major League Baseball game and you'll notice something relatively new: many of the paying customers are not paying attention.

I viewed three random games on the last day of the season. In the shot from behind the pitcher, where maybe the first two rows behind the catcher were visible, I counted 10 people at the Royals-Twins tilt who were clearly unimpressed by the on-field proceedings. Most of them were engaged in conversation. Two of them were looking at or talking on their phones.

At the Astros-Diamondbacks game, where about 10 people get exclusive seats at ground level behind the backstop, one woman was either reading a book or looking at her phone the entire game. Keep in mind, these are precious seats -- front row behind the plate. These tickets cost $100 or more. And she couldn't care less.

I counted about 14 people in the first three rows disengaged from the Dodgers tilt with San Diego, at the very moment Clayton Kershaw was recording his 300th strikeout, the first time that had been accomplished by anyone in more than a decade.

About now you're thinking, so what? So people pay good money to attend baseball games and miss half the game lost in conversation, staring at their phones, taking selfies documenting their attendance or tweeting about the experience they're not experiencing.

So this: You may have noticed that there has been a hue and cry about MLB extending the protective screens around much of the ballpark following a spate of fan beanings by foul balls, wide throws and flying bats. Major League Baseball has been played for 140+ years, yet all of a sudden the number of these incidents has skyrocketed. Why do you suppose that is? Are batters hitting more foul balls? Increasingly losing the grip on their bats? Are fielders wilder with their throws?

No, the problem is that the people in the ballpark are not watching the game. Instead of sticking out the mitt they brought with them to snag a foul fly, they bring their phone to snag a text and get bonked by an errant projectile.

I'm just back from a business trip to Cincinnati and Detroit, where I made sure to take in games at Great American Ballpark and Comerica Field. Both ballparks are exquisite urban parks molded around their downtown cityscapes.  Great American sits on the Ohio Riverfront, connected to Covington, Kentucky and surrounding Ohio towns by throwback bridges reminiscent of the Roberto Clemente in Pittsburgh. It also features neo-smokestacks that spit fire every time a Reds hurler fans an opponent.

Both parks pay homage to their team histories and both feature gigantic, HD video board replete with information about the players on the field. But that's not the main purpose of the video boards.

You see, baseball games are no longer about baseball, or baseball fans. They are about relentless advertising to casual attendees who visit the park for an experience that may include, but is not confined to, and may not even be primarily about, a ballgame. It's phony sausage races and video board competitions. It's blaring music and cheesy interviews from the stands. It's an hour of feting sponsors during the pre-game. (At one point in Cincinnati, General Electric Company, a quarter-trillion dollar business, lauded over the P.A. and shown on the videoboard presenting an oversized check for $7,000 to Muscular Dystrophy. G.E. spends more than that on paper clips each month.)

And it's repeated shots of people kissing and waving and kids dancing, kids dancing, kids dancing.

It's not going to stop, of course, because the teams are filling the stadiums and squeezing every dollar they can from people who pay $75 each to post their birthdays on the scoreboard.

For 100+ years, the zenith of a child's experience at the ballpark was to catch a ball that went into the stands while watching the home nine win. Today, it's getting shown shaking booty on the video board and asking dad on the way home which team won. Fine. But don't cry to me about your broken orbital socket when you get hit by a foul ball you weren't watching.

A Good Start Is A Good Start

There's some good news out of Detroit, and I don't mean that people are buying Fords again. At the risk of over-analyzing one week of play, two key Tigers have brought smiles to the Comerica faithful.

Miguel Cabrera hit .323 with 33 homers in his first campaign with Detroit last year, but was seen as lackadaisical about his play and his conditioning, brought to a head when he was arrested for extremely drunk driving at 5 a.m. late in the season when every game was critical. Detroit lost a one-game playoff for the division title.

Cabrera was also picked up for a domestic incident, though charges were never filed. Tiger management -- most notably task-master manager Jim Leyland -- reportedly delivered to him a verbal spanking in private and challenged him to demonstrate in 2010 that he is worth his $153 million contract.

Cabrera reportedly arrived in camp in better shape, and so far -- sure, it's just four games -- is hitting .471/.526./834 with a couple of homers. Cabrera can hit in his sleep, even when his sleep ends with a hangover, so that's not necessarily a sign that he's unusually fit. But the arrow is pointing in the right direction, and adding his talent with some new focus is scary.

Similarly, Dontrelle Willis has made but one start. Nonetheless, he looked better than he has anytime in the last two years, when he combined for a 1-6, 8.22 mark in just 53 innings, with 35 strikeouts and a miserable 63 walks. At 28, this is it for the amiable lefty, and he has responded with a resurgent spring training and six innings of two-run ball in his opener, punctuated by four strikeouts and just two walks. "His WHIP with Detroit is over 2. His confidence had fallen to zero," wrote Sports Illustrated columnist Jon Heyman.

Indeed, D-Train suffered Social Anxiety Disorder after his trade from Florida --along with Cabrera -- for whom he earned Rookie of the Year status in 2003. Reports from camp in Lakeland indicated that his spirits and velocity had returned to high levels. His first start was a good start, which is a good start and nothing more, but it's still better than a bad start.

If Cabrera can play like an MVP and Willis can deliver even .500 quality in the #5 slot of the rotation, Detroit's title hopes take a giant step forward. In a division that might be had with 86 wins, that's really good news for a city that hasn't had much lately.

Plus, the Ford Fiesta hatchback is pretty cool.
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