Fret not about improving the hitting, pitching, fielding, and payroll of the mediocre Detroit Tigers.
Oh, no.
Instead, the Ilitch ownership is about to give Motor City baseball fans what they really want and need: Luxury seating and a private club around home plate at Comerica Park so fat cats can pay big bucks for better boxes.
“Significant upgrades,” gushed the press release from Ryan Gustafson, president and chief executive officer of Ilitch Sports and Entertainment. “Premium seating … Home Plate Club … Upgraded seating behind home plate … All new loge boxes … Semi-private luxury seating … A privacy wall partially encloses these seats…”
In other words, it will be a gentrified, gated community that further divides fans by wealth. If you must ask the price, bub, you probably can’t afford it. As a great orator once put it: Whoop-de-damn-doo!
I took this thrilling news with me last weekend to watch baseball from less luxurious chairs at Comerica. The Tigers split two excellent and entertaining games with the New York Yankees, losing by 3-0 on Friday night before 36,244 fans but winning by 4-0 Saturday afternoon before 38,110.
While team executives study the blueprints and revenue projections for their new, sweet suites, here is a suggestion for an inexpensive, quick fix to a real and chronic Comerica problem: Show more replays on the big, new, colorful, busy scoreboard.
For instance: One of the best moments of the weekend was the 44th home run of the season by Aaron Judge, the Yankees’ slugger who is among baseball’s elite players. His Friday-night blast carried more than 410 feet, over the fence and into the shrubs in dead center field, the kind of clout you rarely see.
Many New York fans in the park cheered this and even Tigers’ fans gasped. It was most impressive and certainly worth a second look. No doubt viewers in both cities saw it more than once on video replay on their televisions.
But not the paying customers in Comerica Park. It is apparently a law at Comerica that no scenes of opposition scoring can be replayed on the video screen. Why not? Do they fear spontaneous riots of anguish from the groundlings in the cheap seats? Leaps of despair from the upper deck?
That scoreboard uses plenty of time and space for sight gags of fans’ faces and trivial guessing games and musical singalongs and other extraneous features. It also flashes momentary blasts of statistics that vanish too quickly to be absorbed.
But they refuse to replay many moments a normal fan would naturally want to see again. At times, both the big board and even the little, auxiliary boards show only exhortations for fans to cheer. In those moments, you can look around Comerica and see absolutely no score on any scoreboard.
But you might see the command to “Get Loud!” or “Make Noise!” or some other unnecessary prompt. It’s kind of — how do you say this? — bush league and beneath the dignity of a bedrock baseball franchise whose fans already know when to cheer.
The live show at the venue should be superior, not inferior, to the telecast. Which is not to say that stay-at-home fans get total satisfaction from the Tigers’ media presentation on TV and radio.
This season’s cast of characters has been a rotating swirl of faces and voices, even before Craig Monroe left following accusations of past improper sexual behavior with an underage girl.
The pivotal person in this mix is first-year man Jason Benetti, a smooth and witty Chicago wise guy who does play-by-play on most of the telecasts. But he gets replaced by radio voice Dan Dickerson when Benetti has more important gigs for other sports with different networks on the weekends.
Their color analysts on TV include Dan Petry, Kirk Gibson, Carlos Pena, and Todd Jones. You can’t tell the commentators without a scorecard. Benetti juggles their various tempos and temperaments well, but it must be difficult.
On radio, the color commentary comes from Bobby Scales and Andy Dirks. When on radio duty, Dickerson has developed the annoying habit of complaining about pitch calls of umpires before reporting the facts first to his listeners.
For instance: If a 1-1 pitch is on the border of the strike zone, Dickerson might see the call and spout disagreement with “Oh, where was THAT?!?!” Note to Dan: Don’t ask that question to your listeners. You are their eyes. Tell them “that one is called a ball, now it’s a 2-1 count.” After that, whine away.
Local fans must return to radio for some games because they are leaking away from regional TV sports systems like the financially troubled Bally Sports Detroit, which was blacked out for much of the season due to a fee dispute between Bally and Comcast/Xfinity.
Some customers who want Bally back must pay more for it on a premium tier. Even when you pay extra for it, games are being sold off one by one to streaming services, which cost even more money and are often difficult to access.
Others are sold to established cable companies like ESPN, which carried Sunday’s Tigers-Yankees series finale from the special venue in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, for the Little League Classic. Too bad if you’re a cord-cutter. All this might get worse if Bally’s parent company changes its business model or goes bust.
In the meantime, the product this season shows slight improvement, although the franchise remains in the bottom third of Major League Baseball in most metrics. Among the 30 MLB teams beginning play Sunday, the Tigers were in the bottom third in winning percentage, payroll, home attendance, and franchise value.
But, on the field, hope springs eternal in the return of first baseman Spencer Torkelson from his minor-league exile at Toledo. Has he regained the swing that gave him 31 home runs last season? Also back (from his annual leg injury ) is Riley Greene, the charismatic outfielder who is their best position player.
And what’s not to like about starting pitcher Tarik Skubal, an ace lefty and Cy Young candidate who is 14-4 with an earned run average of 2.53?
Mix in young prospects like second baseman Colt Keith, third baseman Jace Jung, and right fielder Kerry Carpenter and you just might seriously think about renewing your season ticket share for next year, even if you can’t afford the Home Plate Club and must rely on seeing video replays from the cheap seats.
