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 Fans of the San Francisco Giants respond to the urging of various mechanical devices at the ball park and make MORE NOISE!!! |
Once a pleasant setting,
it's now an auditory hell
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
I went to a baseball game the other night at AT&T Park between the San Francisco Giants and the Colorado Rockies. The Giants lost in the 10th inning by one run, but baseball, I realized along about the fifth inning, has lost much more: Part of its serene soul.
The noise between innings--and between batters--was excruciating, the music and visual hype cranked up to hysterical levels as the scoreboard exhorted fans throughout the game to ‘MAKE MORE NOISE!!!” A robot organist tried with pathetic insistence to energize the crowd. Meanwhile, the Jumbotron flashed so much endless and useless information on the confusing scoreboard (like watching a TV game at home on a screen littered with arcane stats) that it all but obscured the modest game below. It was hard to locate the one thing you wanted to keep track of--the balls, strikes, outs and who was at bat.
The fans obliged unconvincingly, having by now been trained like Pavlovian dogs to howl when a bell clangs, but the maniacal order to MAKE MORE NOISE!!! went largely unheeded; even the most exuberant fans have by now pretty much learned to ignore the incessantly raucous sound battering.
Indeed, some of the people around me were oblivious to not just the noise but to much of the game itself, babbling on cell phones half the time. One guy was talking to a friend in another part of the park, waving at him as they spoke, so thrilled at being able to communicate with a pal that he hardly seemed to notice the game even though he was paying the steep cost of $72 for a second row seat halfway up the third base line. We were seated in the row behind Giants owner Bill Neukom and president Larry Baer, busily taking bows and chatting to fans, totally unaware of the constant decibel barrage.
The female public address announcer shrieked the name of every man who came to bat as if was the ninth game of the World Series and everything was on the line: “Now batting…Juan Urrrrrr-eeeee-bay!!!” All that bush league screeching for the hometown nine has worn everyone down--yet it goes on mindlessly. As someone said, America is a Big Event country, in which everything is built into a monumental moment--chili cook-offs on TV food shows, models in runway match-ups, brides choosing their wedding gown. Any routine human endeavor has become a heavyweight championship fight on TV. But it has now spread to all parts of the culture off TV, even this quietest of sports--outside of tennis and golf, which somehow have resisted the marketing of excitement.
As a diehard fan of this still mellow and placid game (“Baseball is the only game,” as Babe Ruth beautifully summed it up in a raspy voice at a Yankee Stadium tribute shortly before he died), I was once again struck at how the fan experience has so drastically changed at the game, slowly diminished in the hapless attempt to create exuberance far above the great game itself, which requires no such steady, insulting, needy huckstering.
This is not the same game I went to with my dad in Oakland at Emeryville’s Oaks Ball Park. Well, no, it is the same perfect game, but the atmosphere surrounding it in the last 20 years has done everything it can to diminish it by trying to make baseball more than it is or should be or wants to be, as club owners ruthlessly try to turn every game into a rock concert and light show to sell it to fans already sold or they wouldn’t be at the park.
There in little old Emeryville, surrounded by seedy saloons and card rooms, in a humble life-size arena with no sushi or super tacos or po’ boy sandwiches available, just the fabled hot dogs and peanuts and Crackerjack, my dad and I watched our hallowed Oakland Oaks in the late 1940s play their hearts out in the Pacific Coast League against gifted Triple A rivals--the San Francisco Seals, Los Angeles Angels, Sacramento Solons, Seattle Rainiers, Portland Beavers, San Diego Padres and Hollywood Stars.
My father, in his neat, squared off-printing, dutifully kept score, something few fans do anymore (are scorecards even still sold at games?). He rarely so much as commented on the game itself as it went along, content simply to relish it for what it is--a contest of precision athletic skills and strategizing wits. I can’t recall that he ever stood and yelled, or shook his fist, let alone booed or applauded. A few sidelong comments revealed him as “a student of the game,” as they say, baseball lessons I learned at his side. He would get particularly incensed at bonehead or showboat plays, such as a runner recklessly trying to score on a single with two outs in a tie game, only to get thrown out at home.
Sure, there were a few random bozos in the stands who would scream and boo, but such rare doltishness hadn’t become commercialized and turned into something out of a Third Reich rally. I don’t know if this sort of craziness goes on at all other Major League ball parks, but I fear it does. I was at a game in Anaheim between the L.A. Angels and the Detroit Tigers a month earlier and the same crowd badgering went on there too, plus such inane refinements as rally monkeys, twirling towels and clacking stick sounds.
Baseball has been cut up into a metaphor
for American life far too often (even Chief Justice John Roberts
compared judging cases to calling balls and strikes), but the
vast difference in those quiet, efficient Oaks games and the
roaring torture chamber I found myself in at PacBell Park is
too painfully precise a metaphor for what has befallen American
pop culture. If you want to know America, you must understand
baseball, famously said Jacques Barzun, and ballpark noise echoes
the nation’s love of booming noise for its own sake--thumping
car radios, blaring Dolby/Sensurround movie sound. The manic
effort to manufacture and market excitement is all over TV--rowdy
reality shows, frantic contests, explosive talk show audiences--and
now has invaded, and all but wrecked, live professional baseball.
Not baseball itself, to be sure, but baseball parks, which have
infected the relaxed natural pace, subtle joys and intrigue of
the actual game.
The gut problem is that baseball owners don’t trust the
game to sell itself, or the fans to respond to it naturally.
Nobody in the stands needs revving up. We will shout when the
occasion calls for it, and don’t need to be told when, or
how loud, to root.
It’s easier and more fun now to watch a game on TV, or better
still to listen to it. The TV version forces you to watch what
you don’t want to watch, such as endless shots of dopey
face-painted fans, cute babies, smooching couples and others
who play to the cameras--as the cameras gleefully comply. This
looks like part of the Giants' marketing plan--to show that the
game is for families (all those adorable tots!), dating couples
and loonies who have nothing better to do than dress up in outlandish
gear for viewers.
Baseball on radio happily is still uncorrupted,
largely what it was 50 years ago, where sportscasters report
and chat about the game in much the same subdued, informed way
they always have, marred only by product placement on almost
every play: “The Dodge Ram drive of the game” for hard
hit liners, SpeeDee Oil Change for pitching changes; it’s
only a matter of time until every pitch is accompanied by a commercial
pitch (“strike two--and that’s dinner for two at the
Strikeout Steak House!”). But at least on TV and radio you’re
protected from the violent sounds and flashing images that mug
you at the game.
None of this is a new complaint, but sportswriters and broadcasters
long ago despaired of trying to persuade owners of modern baseball
parks to put a sock in it. The owners are convinced that phony
crowd fever makes the game more thrilling or something. But the
game can take care of itself, thank you. It has survived racism,
the DH, Charley Finley, inter-league play, Astroturf, domed stadiums,
even George Steinbrenner and steroids. Today’s crowds--raised
on the hysteria of rock concerts and crazed TV show jump-cuts
and hype--don’t seem to notice how the surrounding racket
at otherwise handsome and tasteful modern ball parks has done
everything it can to ruin the classic human dimensions of the
game by drowning it out in gimmickry and superfluous noise.
So take me out to the ball game, by all
means, but first take out all of the mechanical
cheerleading.
©2010 by Gerald Nachman. The caricature of Gerald Nachman is © by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI'S Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted June 28, 2010.
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can comment on this column online via our TALKBACK page. Please address your e-mail message
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