What does the opening day of the baseball season mean to you? Anything other than just another season of high-paid athletes strutting their stuff on the ball field? I guess your answer may depend on your age. Today’s youth have much more to occupy their time and attention. Their heroes appear in highly visual movies and video games. Their activities are more sedentary and solitary than what kids did forty or fifty years ago. The world changes, but is it for the better?

            That’s the question that occupied my mind as I watched the Detroit Tigers run out on the field at Comerica Park for the first time this year. Times have definitely changed. The most obvious difference was the park. The Detroit Tigers and Lions had always played at Tiger Stadium when I was a kid. The Tigers played their final game there in 1999, the Lions in 1974. They started demolition on Tiger Stadium in 2008, and the vacant lot remains a center of controversy for the city of Detroit to this day. The city itself has changed a great deal since the 1960s. Already in decline when I was a kid, Detroit has been ravaged by crime, corruption, and blight in the last half-century. The population has dropped from over 1.6 million in 1960, to 713,000 in 2010, the lowest level since 1919. More recently, its former mayor was convicted of corruption, and sentenced to twenty-six years in jail. An emergency manager was appointed to run the city’s financial chaos. He has placed the city in Chapter 9 bankruptcy. On the plus side, the people are coming together to save their city. A new Police Chief has been hired. Crime is dropping. Money is being found to restore city services and tear down the thousands of abandoned homes. While not the city of my youth, Detroit is making a comeback.

            But it’s not just the ball park and the city that have changed. It seems to me that life itself has changed for the worse. Gone is the time when the neighborhood was a close-knit group of friends, where everyone helped each other. Gone are the times when a child could walk to school without fear. And gone is any illusion of innocence that baseball once represented.

            My grandfather pitched for the Chicago White Sox in the 1930s. He was a devoted, hard-working man who played for the love of the game. Baseball was his passion, his dream. But professional baseball players didn’t make much money back in the 30s, and he was in love. If he wanted to get married and raise a family, he would have to forsake his dream. That was still an age when people made great personal sacrifices for another person. My grandfather quit baseball and became a commercial bus driver. He sacrificed his dream to raise two wonderful daughters, one of whom was my mother. After years as a regional manager for Dairy Queen, he finished life as a maintenance man for an apartment complex. How many of today’s baseball player would make such a sacrifice?

            My heroes as a child were baseball players like Al Kaline and Willie Horton. They made more money than my grandfather, but still had to work during the offseason to pay the bills. In an interview last weekend, Kaline talked about playing simply for the love of the game. Life was different then, more innocent and caring. Sure we lived with things like the Cuban Missile Crises, the assassination of our political and civil-rights leaders. The nightly news was filled with the body counts from Vietnam and war protests. But we were thrilled by the space race. We spent weekends at a neighbor’s having barbeques. We had neighborhood block parties where everyone was like family. Kids played kick-the-can in the streets till late in the evening. I rode my bicycle four miles through busy streets to reach the baseball diamonds for Little League practice and games. Going to a Tigers’ game was a sacred event, the highlight of the summer.

            But things had changed dramatically by my son’s generation. Terrorists had attacked our nation. Our homeland was no longer safe. Murder and home invasions filled our nightly newscasts. We drove our son to a friend’s house if it was more than a few blocks. He never played in the streets like we did as children. Other than our immediate neighbors, I couldn’t have told you who lived a half mile away. And even though we walked out dogs daily, few we passed ever raised a hand in greeting, let alone stopped and talked. Society had deteriorated to the point where neighbor didn’t trust neighbor, or worse still, had stopped caring about their neighbor’s welfare. These are the values my son grew up learning from society. And although I’d like to think we taught him better, I fear these values will be passed on to his children—that trust and the human life have no meaning.

            Still, watching opening day, I optimistically watched for some remnants of the old innocence the game represented in my youth. My hopes were quickly dashed when fans were delayed from entering Comerica Park due to all the new security measures installed. And do players still play for the fun of the game? Ask Miguel Cabrera. He just signed an eight-year extension worth 292-million dollars. My grandfather wouldn’t be rolling over in his grave. He’d be too confused about what had become of his beloved game—where pleasing players matters more than the game itself.

The age of innocence has died. Some may think this opinion is too harsh. I might agree until I read the daily newspaper. Some recent events reiterated my feelings that society has fallen into moral decay. A dog was found skinned alive and left to die in Detroit this winter. There were over a thousand shootings within a six-week period, many resulting in the deaths of innocent victims and youths. The theft of charity boxes from stores and churches are a daily event. Yesterday, a Salvation Army store was held up at gunpoint. But here’s one that really that reinforces my point. A man accidently hit a 10-year-old boy in his car last week. Hit and runs are frequent in Detroit, but the police claim the accident wasn’t the driver’s fault. The driver stopped and got out of his truck to assist the boy, who had a broken leg. Despite the driver’s pleas, a gang of twelve youths and adults nearly beat the man to death. He remains in a coma. Some are calling this a racial-hate crime. I call it a lack of values in today’s society. And if society has deteriorated so much in my lifetime, how much more will it deteriorate during the lives of our children and grandchildren? Will it get to a point that we fear going to opening day at the ball park?