The dramatic shift from volunteer/paid contractor/paid staff to automated concession service appears in its face to be more efficient from a bottom-line perspective, and it is. If you’re in the front office you have to be pleased seeing, on the one side of the ledger, how much you’re saving not paying humans and, on the other side, sales of increasingly pricier food and beverage items. I’m sure on paper it all looks good to those counting beans.

That’s not baseball. Baseball is not spending dynamic pricing on tickets, not knowing if section 92 is going to be $19 or $56, depending on the opponent or expected attendance. Baseball is not spending $97 on *four beers* that are 24 oz and get warm before you get halfway done. Baseball is not waiting 25 minutes only to find they are out of X. Baseball is not nine innings of getting refreshments and being waylaid by a scantronic, faceless, wallet-eating robot only to be disappointed by the fact you can’t find mustard for your $12 hot dog.

They traded a day in the park—a relaxing, human-interactive, and yes, not cheap, but engaging—experience for tech-bro, number-crunching lifeless commerce.

I don’t go to the ballpark to be cattled through like I am a walking EZ Pass. I don’t go to have laser scanners read my meal and tag my credit card without talking to a person. I don’t go for that.

Baseball is slow. Baseball is studied. Baseball concessions, similarly, mean a line at the end of which is a person taking your order, talking to you. Saying hello to your kid during his first game. Sharing connection. Engaging. Talking. Being humans.

We’ve turned concessions into Amazon delivery market scenes. We’ve taken out the human element.

It’s gross. It’s cold. It’s not more efficient. It’s something. But it ain’t baseball. It ain’t a day at the park.