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.

Getting On the JV Team

The winner of this year's Ben Zobrist Award for the best player who came out of nowhere will be Joey Votto. This is a trick selection. Just because you're not familiar with him doesn't mean the big-swinging, 27-year-old lefty isn't already an accomplished Major League hitter.

The Reds' first baseman, Votto has been pounding Major League pitching for two years and a coffee break. His .310/.388/.536 resume may be (Great American) Ballpark-aided, but 53 homers and 77 doubles in a thousand at-bats is hard to argue with.

Votto enters his third full season ready to explode. With a couple of full campaigns under his belt, with an increasing walk rate and with an improving team around him, the big Canadian is channeling Justin Morneau in the Queen City. His .414 OBP in an injury-trimmed season last year suggests a full year of Votto could catapult him into the MVP discussion in '10.

If that happens, you'll hear of him. And you'll wonder, where did this guy come from? Well, a pretty good place.
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