Baseball has always been a huge part of my life. I would literally choose a July game between the Royals and Orioles over NFL football any Sunday. That’s why it pains me to say I’m embarrassed to be an Arizona Diamondbacks fan. 

As opening day approaches I’m sure Diamondbacks president Derrick Hall and the folks in the front office are putting their collective heads together to come up with the next ridiculous between-inning promotion. We already have the Chevron car race, hot dog race, Taco Bell race, shuffling hats, trivia challenge, Fry’s giveaway, Bobcat mascot, and entertainment squad (code for cheerleaders). You know what they have in New York? An organ and the seventh inning stretch.

Are we so starved for entertainment that we can’t sit without a mind numbing marketing ploy for two minutes between innings? Recently Derrick Hall was featured in the Arizona Republic talking about his family approach to running a team. I’m all for that. But it’s baseball. It’s already family friendly. And before you say the game moves too slowly or your child doesn’t understand it, how about you spend those two minutes between innings teaching him or her the game. I promise you those few minutes will be more meaningful and family friendly than any taco/burrito race.  

This speaks to a bigger problem - our inability to focus and appreciate as a society. We’re so busy trying to consume that all we do is clamor for information and stimulation.  This causes businesses and marketers to constantly try to put information out there. But the problem is when you run out of good things to say you end up shouting louder or repeating yourself. So now the same mentality that crowds the media and makes mush of interesting new methods of communication has crept into our national pastime and we should be embarrassed. 

I’ve been a season ticket holder and sat in the same seats since the inaugural season. I was at the first game in 1998 and Game 7 in 2001 and now I’m afraid to say I’m a Diamondbacks fan. All of the original season ticket holders around us have left and are now replaced by out of town fans laughing at our expense as the crowd roars with passion when mustard beats relish but sits idly by for anything actually happening on the field. 

I don’t want to put all of the blame on the Diamondbacks but I’m pretty sure if they simply stopped, or at least dramatically reduced, the between-inning circus it wouldn’t take long before the crowd began appreciating the game again. Fathers would explain to their sons and daughters the importance of going first to third, bunting, and the infield fly rule instead of wrestling to get on the “kiss cam.”

If the Diamondbacks front office thinks this market needs baseball with bells and whistles, then clearly they haven’t ventured to any of the packed spring training facilities. It is here that baseball is at its purest. Where the game feels, smells and tastes the way it should. I’d like to ask Mr. Hall to go to one of those games and truly watch and listen. What he’ll find is a crowd, city, and state that appreciates this game and expects much more with much less from its hometown organization.

Check it out. Here I am providing some insight in last months “Marcom Corner” section of Impact Magazine…

I’m a big fan of newspapers. I really am. Being in the PR industry has basically conditioned me to love the paper. But I’m getting a little bit tired of listening to people cry about the death of the newspaper. 

Papers are dying all around the country. It seems like everyday we hear about a new one going down and it’s greeted with the same shock and despair every time. One of our papers right here in Arizona shut down recently and basically eulogized itself in its pages with former and current writers lamenting the end of an era while angrily glaring at the future. Well you know whose fault this whole thing is? YOURS!

I’m as distressed as anyone that pontificators with a blog (I get the irony, believe me) are soon going to be looked at as authorities on news. That’s going to be a sad day. But I’m not going to feel sad for the newspapers around the word that are dying because you failed to adapt. Everything around you told you that it was time to change and you decided to ignore it, or worse spit in its face. For as much as I respect journalists, there wasn’t much investigative reporting going on in regards to how to keep papers alive. 

It’s survival of the fittest and the newspaper lost. Bottom line. Had they evolved we wouldn’t be having this discussion today. The excuses are already flooding in - advertising, non-journalists at the helm, shorter attention spans, etc, but perhaps had your evolution involved more than “maybe we should look into this online thing and up our entertainment stories,” then you could hold your tears and anger for the next set of cutbacks. 

So, instead of being distraught about it’s demise, I’ll look forward to the thinning of the heard and know that those left standing are the true journalists in a world of blowhards and curmudgeons.