Theme Parks Wrong

Let’s talk about the new ballparks that are, alas, ballparks built for people who know only a little about baseball.

Turner Field in Atlanta, the newest playpen, is built on the idea of milking money from folks with short attention spans. Or, to quote Jack Rouse, whose entertainment planning firm helped plan the Braves’ version of Disney World: “Baseball is sure not about nine guys on a field anymore. If we are going to hook people on baseball, we don’t do it by making them sit through nine innings. If we can make the experience more pleasurable, we should.”

Precious, no? The man sees baseball as punishment. So, rather than inflict pain on folks through the torture of baseball played for nine innings, Rouse would have those folks pay for bells and whistles designed to distract them from their suffering.

Might all this offend baseball purists? Thinking here of Turner Field’s gimmicks: interactive computerized pitching/batting games, museums, four giant neon-lighted tomahawks chopping every 1.12 seconds, videoboards and TV screens, restaurants, a mini-brewery, luxury boxes to insulate the wealthy against the possibility of bumping into anyone who might recite the infield fly rule.

To that question--Is all this too much for purists?--Jack Rouse says, “I’m not sure there are many of them anymore.”

Once upon a time, baseball owners built ballparks on the idea that people bought tickets to see a baseball game.

Seems quaint, doesn’t it?

Now we want not a game but an experience.

It’s an evolution that began with the Brooklyn Dodgers, who in 1913 moved into Ebbets Field, named for the club owner, Charles Hercules Ebbets, who built the park for $750,000. He said, “I’ve made more money than I ever expected to, but I am putting all of it, and more, into the new plant for the Brooklyn fans. . . . I believe the fan should be taken care of.”

Small but gorgeous, with a marble rotunda and chandeliers in the shape of bats and balls, Ebbets Field would be the scene of heroics for a generation to come--until 1957, when Walter O’Malley decided the Brooklyn fan no longer needed to be taken care of.

The club owner’s move of the Dodgers to Los Angeles was a dislocation both real and psychic that changed baseball forever by revealing a truth that had been well hidden: Baseball cared first about money and only later about its fans.

Money makes the world go ‘round, and no one would argue that baseball should give away its product for the good of humankind. But doesn’t major league baseball risk losing its grass-roots appeal if it builds ballparks where a game costs a family a fortune?

The clubs say they are going broke. So they raise ticket prices. They fleece the TV networks. And then comes the decision that leads to new ballparks. That decision: Get new fans.

Baseball would replace its faithful customers with high-dollar corporate moguls who think of the ballpark first as an evening’s entertainment and only later, if at all, as a sports event.

Well, high-dollar moguls need luxury. No hardback seats for a man in Armani. Nor could a mogul be expected to endure the sounds of the common man or, heaven forbid, be touched by such a person. So the Armani man would need a place of his own. Voila, the luxury suite.

The first such suites, if memory serves, were created in Texas Stadium where the Cowboys turned a mean game into computerized, glitzy, sexy entertainment.

Soon enough, the race was on in all sports, even basketball, where new arenas were built to accommodate corporate chieftains who liked the idea of going to a game as long as they didn’t actually have to mingle with the sort of people who go to games.

By the 1980s, the baseball/football stadiums of the ‘60s were obsolete. Worse, they could not be retrofitted for luxury suites except at exorbitant costs. Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium was out, and Oriole Park at Camden Yards was in. In Cleveland, Memorial Stadium gave way to Jacobs Field.

Camden Yards, the Jake and Denver’s Coors Field are wonderful expressions of an idea that appeals to most baseball fans: Keep the nostalgia but get rid of the grime. So the ballparks are made with steel girders and brick for the old-timey feel. And they come dressed out with amenities such as . . .

“Our special Scout’s Alley game cluster offers interactive batting cages, pitching games and a variety of other ways to impress your friends, embarrass yourself or just have one heck of a good time.”

So reads ad copy for Turner Field, which, the copy writers tell us, is “not just a ball park. It’s more like a baseball theme park.”

The cold truth as we near the 21st century is that it’s not enough to sell tickets to faithful customers, not enough to sell TV rights, not enough to sell the stadium’s name--baseball must create more ways to take money from kids who just want Chipper Jones to smile and say hi.

The new ballpark is a quick fix. Name a city, and chances are it has a new stadium, has one planned or wants one. It’s true in Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Houston, New York, Chicago, Arlington, St. Petersburg, Miami, Milwaukee and Atlanta.

What’s next? An all-luxury suite ballpark? Well, why not? In the year 2012, the New Turner Field might have suites for 28,765 people paying $1,000 a ticket. It would be baseball as opera. And because theater-goers cannot be expected to put down their champagne glasses on a moment’s notice, applause would be provided by tape-recordings of the old days when real, live, sweaty, blue-collar folks went crazy for a simple baseball game.

Sigh.