The class system and the ballpark

Emma Span of Sports on Earth looks at that business with the Twins’ aborted effort to sell tickets to batting practice and gets to, what I feel anyway, is the heart of the matter: the luxury-i-fication of Major League Baseball games:

Target Field is a beautiful new stadium, but like most of the beautiful new stadiums, it comes with much more built-in class separation than most ballparks used to have ... there are more than a few additional luxury seats and suites and clubs than there used to be. Increasingly, ballgames feel like airlines: they have a clearly defined caste system. People willing to pay extra get an entirely different experience than the rest of us. And that context makes a relatively harmless offer like early BP tickets feel more ominous: just one more perk for the fans with money, one more thing they get that we don’t. There are a lot of those moments in life, of course, and this is way, way down on the list of important ones. Still, it would be nice to get a bit of a break from all that at a ball game.

This is not just at ballparks. It’s seemingly everywhere. The ability to pay to get out of some sort of drudgery of everyday life or, alternatively, to get a taste of the good life. Front-of-the-line-passes. Elite status everything. It’s, in most respects, a logical extension of a capitalist system -- if people want something, someone will provide it at some cost -- but it also comes at another cost, and that of a shared civic experience.

Maybe it’s not worth the inconvenience, but there is something being lost in this country when it comes to this sort of thing. The idea that all of us, rich or poor, know what it’s like to stand on the same line for some thing. There is an equalizing aspect to it all. Sure, maybe the super rich could have a servant go mail a package or something, but most of us all used to sit in the same general sections, stand in the same lines and deal with the same experiences as anyone else. And even if there were differences -- good seats always cost more than cheap seats -- there wasn’t such a clear demarcation between them. The exclusivity of a given thing was not so apparent. Indeed, I think half the time now you pay that extra bit precisely for that image of exclusivity more than you pay for the enhanced good or service itself.

Now we don’t have to sit in the same areas and stand in the same lines. At least we don’t if we have the means to avoid it. Which, quite often, is nice. But I do feel like it highlights our differences and creates divisions in ways that the old, inefficient and sometimes dreary ways never did. And even if it’s not enough to make me want to take away someone’s Platinum Elite Priority Status, it is in many ways regrettable.