DETROIT -- It was a beautiful Sunday and, as it happened to be Easter, I had a day off from work. But as I watched the sun rise and checked the predicted forecast (near 70 degrees), I couldn’t resist the urge to go to the office.

That might sound strange, but my office is Comerica Park, where I’ve covered the Detroit Tigers for almost three seasons.

For this game against the Chicago White Sox, I didn’t sit in the press box. I purchased tickets. I bought peanuts and a hot dog. I wandered through the concourse and sat in the cheap seats. For the first time in a long time, I experienced the game as a fan.

I also brought my boyfriend, who grew up in a part of Colombia where baseball is all but unknown and who had never even seen a game on television, let alone in person.

This would offer a two perspectives: The world-weary sports writer who had seen probably thousands of games in his lifetime and a complete neophyte who had no clue what to expect.

What I found made me wonder not just about the future of baseball, but of live, in-person spectator sports in general.

After nearly three hours in the seats, I began to think we in the media were asking the wrong questions about the dwindling attendance that has been a consistent trend across baseball and other sports. Instead of bemoaning the shrinking crowds, perhaps we should marvel that there are still thousands and thousands of people willing to pay a premium price and endure all sorts of inconveniences to come to games.

For one day, I was one of them. And although I left with more questions than answers, I think it was healthy to leave the ivory tower -- or at least the press box -- for one afternoon.

Outside Comerica Park on April 21, 2019.

Sticker-shock prices for the ‘cheap seats’

Let’s start at the beginning. My first real-world lesson arrived before we even left the house: Going to games is not cheap.

The least expensive ticket offered for sale on Tigers.com on April 21 was $20. But while that price was already higher than I expected to pay for a sparsely attended early-season game, the listing was deceptively low. Fees added $5 per ticket. Then another, unexplained $4.10 “per order” fee was tacked on at the end. The cheapest tickets were now $27.05 a pop.

(Prices are “dynamic” and some weeknight games are as low as $10 apiece before fees. My game was likely higher because it was a Sunday afternoon).

I ended up paying slightly more because I wanted slightly better seats.

A ticket in Section 218 -- in the upper deck, perched in shallow right field, a few feet behind the first baseman -- cost $26, plus a fee (now $5.25), plus a per-order fee that remained $4.10. So it was $33.30 per ticket. Definitely not cheap, but I could have paid much more if I had wanted to get closer to the action.

As it turned out, I was glad that I didn’t, because we ended up walking around much of the game and taking advantage of the multiple standing/leaning/sitting opportunities scattered around the park.

It’s a lot to ask a kid to sit still for three hours, but it’s not easy for adults, either. Thus, in addition to areas for kids, there are ample rails, patios, decks and sometimes just designated spots to stand for those who get restless and want to stretch their legs.

The advantage of the upper deck -- really, the only advantage of the upper deck -- in Comerica Park and other modern stadiums is that it gives you a wider perspective of the field, the alignment of players and the depth of hits. This was helpful for someone who had never seen a baseball game before.

But in the upper deck we often felt disconnected from the game that seemed like was going on miles and miles below.

Some players (Miguel Cabrera, on right) are better known than others (Gordon Beckham, left). (AP photo by Frank Franklin II)AP

Short attention spans and distractions galore

That disengagement from what was taking place on the field was probably the most jarring thing about watching a game in the stands.

There was an announced crowd of 15,686 in the 41,297-capacity stadium, and I don't claim to speak for all of them. Nor do I mean my observation as a criticism of baseball fans in general or Tigers fans specifically.

But it quickly became clear that the game on the field was only an intermittent distraction for many of the spectators. Sometimes they were preoccupied with conversations with friends or family seated nearby. But, let’s be honest: Far more often they were looking at their cell phones.

As someone who watches a game with a laptop full of distractions in front of him, I’m in no position to judge.

My experience in the stands reinforced my belief that the Tigers and other MLB teams made the right decision by expanding the portion of seats covered by protective netting. People not paying attention to the game are sitting ducks at risk of getting seriously injured by foul balls (or bats or errant throws or T-shirt guns).

More broadly, it illustrates one of the biggest challenges facing any spectator sport or event: Dwindling attention spans.

I’m not sure how to cure this or if a solution even exists.

But I do think there are two factors that have hurt the Tigers in recent years: A lack of meaningful games and marketable stars.

Sure, even for playoff-bound teams, April games are not going to have the atmosphere of a late-summer pennant race. But when the game you are watching actually matters in some larger sense, I think you’re more likely to pay attention.

In baseball, stars can be developed or purchased. After years of pursuing the latter strategy, the Tigers are trying to grow their own. That’s a perfectly acceptable way of doing things, but it’s left the Tigers with Miguel Cabrera and a cast of largely anonymous characters.

That’s not to say the other 24 players on the team aren’t valuable, marketable or fan-friendly. Some, like Nicholas Castellanos or Matthew Boyd, are better known than others. But to many fans, the vast majority of players on the roster are basically a rotating cast of “Miggy’s teammates” who are temporarily wearing a Tigers jersey.

Reporters are in an echo chamber. We communicate almost exclusively with people who are deeply engaged in the game on a daily basis. The readers and fans we interact with most frequently are the sliver of fans who follow every transaction and know every player. But those fans are a minority. Most, like the man sitting behind us, have no freaking clue who Brandon Dixon is and why he’s playing first base on this Sunday afternoon.

(He was claimed off waivers from the Reds in November and was recalled from the Mud Hens a few days ago. And he’s a nice guy -- give him a chance!)

Fans line up outside Comerica Park before a game in 2018.

Baseball can be an arcane game if you’re not used to it

It’s interesting to see baseball through the eyes of someone who’s never seen a baseball game before. It’s also incredibly difficult and sometimes frustrating.

I stuck to the basics: Each team got a turn to hit every inning. There were nine innings and three outs per inning.

Balls and strikes were more difficult. The concept was simple enough, but foul balls complicated matters. You get a strike after a foul ball until you reach two strikes. I thought I had explained it well enough in Spanish, but as my boyfriend became increasingly baffled by a long at-bat that featured a half-dozen two-strike foul balls, it was clear that something got lost in translation.

For those of us who grew up around baseball, the rules are intuitive. For everyone else, they’re complex and confusing.

That’s why the best hope for baseball’s future is kids who play the game and parents who teach the game.

While I was stumbling through Spanish explanations of basic baseball rules, I watched a kid in front of us point out the balls, strikes and outs on the scoreboard to his younger brother. He told his mother about his favorite position and place in the batting order on his youth team.

He’s likely a long-term baseball fan in the making. Baseball needs to keep nurturing kids like him.

The trend of youth sports specialization, personal coaches and early-age travel teams isn’t just a baseball issue. It's happening in all sports. But it’s especially important that the average kids and average athletes who don’t have the talent or aspiration to join a travel team have a place to play baseball, learn the rules and have fun.

That’s the way to build future customers, and I think Major League Baseball gets it, as they’ve invested millions in youth baseball and softball programs just like that. Without that early-life indoctrination, baseball is just a confusing and often boring parlor game played on a nicely manicured field.

A big crowd for a Tigers-Blue Jays game in June 2018.

Chasing the sun in a half-empty park

Although my boyfriend was polite enough to mask his boredom, it was clear he found much of what was happening on the field bewildering. He was far more interested in the stadium itself and the fans inside it.

He was sporting a throwback faux jersey from 1984 with Alan Trammell's name on the back (just inducted into the Hall of Fame! I told him) and there must have been hundreds of other fans who made a similar apparel choice.

Our real seats in Section 218 were surprisingly crowded (in the sense that there were fans on all sides). Not only did we not get any weird looks for speaking Spanish, we heard other fans speaking Spanish several times over the course of the day.

We kept moving, not only to see different parts of the stadium but to keep following the sun.

In the summer, shaded seats are in demand. In the springtime, it's the opposite. The shaded portion of the stands are empty and everyone hunts the sunshine.

When we wanted to take a break from standing, we chose sun-speckled seats in the lower bowl that were clearly unoccupied. The ushers never gave us a hard time or demanded to see our tickets.

That would have been a test of the all-digital ticket policy instituted at Comerica Park this year:

"Sir, may I see your tickets, please?"

"Uh, let me charge my phone first."

In truth, entry to the stadium was easy and fairly swift even though everyone was getting their cell phone scanned at the gate. Maybe it's more complicated when there are 40,000 fans instead of 15,000.

But games like that are rare. In 2018, the Tigers had one sell-out (on Opening Day). After that, no game had more than 35,000 fans. Only six games drew an announced crowd greater than 30,000.

Attendance is cyclical and linked most closely to winning. But the Tigers and other teams have also made decisions that choose revenue over attendance.

Many teams could, if they wanted, increase their attendance. But they’ve crunched the numbers and found that they can make more money by maximizing revenue per fan than by maximizing the number of fans.

This is nothing earth-shattering: Movie theaters, aquariums, museums, theme parks are all using predictive algorithms to find the right price and determine the trade-off between revenue and attendance.

But baseball seems to have gone about this strategy more aggressively in recent years as stadium capacities have shrunk and the “cheap seats” have become considerably less cheap.

The game we attended on Easter Sunday is an interesting case study, as only the hardiest, most dedicated portion of the fan base (mainly season-ticket holders and a few hard-core single-game attendees) will pay full-price for games in April.

There were more than 25,000 empty seats available on the day we attended, yet the cheapest ticket we could purchase was $27.

If the Tigers sold the cheapest seats for $5, I have no doubt their attendance would go up. But it would undercut the most loyal portion of the fan base and encourage others to buy their cheap tickets at the last minute.

It's the same reason an airline would rather fly a half-empty flight from Detroit to Tokyo instead of charging $499 for those $2,000 seats.

Baseball, like an airline, is a business. But finding a way to get more fans into the stadium could help grow the business over the long-term, even if there’s a revenue trade-off in the short-term.

Detroit Tigers' Gordon Beckham rounds third base after his solo home run (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)AP

How to spend three hours: Baseball or the zoo?

Tigers shortstop Gordon Beckham hit a home run in the seventh inning not far from where we had been standing in left field a few moments earlier. But by that time we had shifted to the right field side to catch more sun.

“Well, at least you saw a home run,” I said to my boyfriend.

“No, I don’t think so,” he replied.

“It just happened. That was it.”

“Oh.”

So much for my baseball lessons.

There were plenty of good things about a Sunday afternoon at Comerica Park.

* Perhaps outrageous concession prices are such a part of life now that they’ve lost their power to shock, but I found the prices at Comerica to be almost reasonable compared to other places with a captive market (airports, movie theaters, stadiums and arenas).

We bought two hot dogs and split a bag of peanuts. We were understandably thirsty, but resisted the urge to buy an overpriced soft drink. Instead, we purchased a $1 bottle water after the game from the youth vendors who set up shop just outside the stadium.

We didn't get any beers, which would have increased the cost significantly (and probably our enjoyment of the game, too!)

* Employees were unfailingly friendly. Everyone seemed happy to be there.

* Traffic was light and parking was a breeze. I know this is a source of anxiety for a lot of fans, and I can't make sweeping comments on the parking situation because it was a Sunday morning on a major holiday. But it appeared that parking was not only plentiful but cheaper than usual. If you don't mind walking, you can park for as little as $5. And it was such a gorgeous day, the walk was pleasant and not a burden.

* The in-stadium entertainment struck the right balance -- entertaining without being obnoxious -- and the new public announcer was professional.

All that said, would I go back to Comerica Park to watch a game that I wasn’t being paid to cover?

That’s a difficult question. I’ve loved baseball since I was kid and although covering it on a daily basis can be exhausting, I don’t consider myself jaded. I still love the game and, most of the time, I love what I do.

But baseball has its work cut out. So do all live events that are competing with an incredible buffet of cheaper entertainment options that most Americans now have at their disposal.

Sports can provide hundreds and hundreds of hours of live programming at a time when few people watch live TV, making leagues and teams more valuable than ever. Maybe one day we’ll view stadiums as expensive television studios and the idea that thousands of people once spent gobs of money to watch a game in person will seem quaint -- or even absurd.

But until then, baseball and other professional sports are still banking on the fact that many people will still come to games, cheer on their team and perhaps buy a hot dog or two.

Baseball's competition isn't limited to just the NHL or NBA or Netflix. It's literally everything else you can do for entertainment for three hours on a sunny afternoon or a pleasant evening.

The day after we went to the ballpark, we decided to walk to the Detroit Zoo.

We paid $18 each (kids are cheaper) and enjoyed about three hours walking around the park-like setting in the sunshine.

I think my boyfriend enjoyed the zoo more than the baseball game. By the looks of it, the hundreds of parents and kids enjoying an affordable family outing were also having a good time.

If I’m being honest, I probably enjoyed it more, too. We may even go back later this summer (we didn’t get a chance to feed the giraffes!)

Will we go back to the ballpark? Probably not. I have to work.