When Home Plate Meets Unlimited Dinner Plate

This article appeared on HometownHeadlines.com, a regional news and business website, on April 4, 2008. I was asked to write about my experience sitting in the all-you-can-eat seats section at the Rome Braves' 2008 season opener.

by Mickey Seward

It seems like such a good idea, it really does. Combining the national pastime with an unlimited pass through the food line, all-you-can-eat seats for Rome Braves' games at State Mutual Stadium has "winner" written all over it.

But I gotta tell ya, I'm miserable. Sure, it's a "Wow, I can't believe I ate that much food ... and I can't wait to do it again!" kind of miserable but it's still miserable.

You see, when you put a kid in front of a bowl of candy, he's going to eat until you tell him to stop--or at least until he gets sick. And even then, he's still going to try to get more.

When you put a baseball fan in a ballpark and tell him to eat as much as he wants, the result is going to be similar. It was Thursday night, anyway.

That was the plan all along. My buddy Jarrod and I went into this thing with a simple goal: we wanted to ruin this promotion for the rest of Rome. It's nothing personal, we just wanted the Braves' staff to at least consider the fact that allowing a couple of guys into the ballpark to eat as much as they could might not be a great idea after all.

Making the money back from the $25 tickets (the seats are in the $8 section) wasn't going to be an issue for us. The real challenge was going to be how much over the $17 worth of food we needed to eat to break even would we consume.

When scorecard meets menu

For the first time in my life, I went to a professional baseball game thinking as much about the concession stand as the ballgame. There were going to be two winners this night. One would be a baseball team. The other winner, I knew before the game even started, would be me. I was going to beat the concession stand.

And once I entered the ballpark, my game began.

First, we had to learn the process, since Thursday's game marked the first time this promotion has taken place in Rome. It's not hard to figure out. Section 117, located as far down the right field line as you can go without getting grass stains on your pants, is the all-you-can-eat section, and when you enter a tent that leads to your seat, you're given a wristband.

The wristband is to signify that you are an all-you-can-eater; to me it's a badge of honor, a signal to anyone who cares to know that I am here to dominate my friendly rivalry with the concession stand.

Inside that tent is a small buffet, filled with hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecue, beans, coleslaw, soft drinks and, rumor had it, fruit. You can also pick up nachos, popcorn and ice cream bars at the concession stand behind the tent.

Before the game started, I filled a plate. Hall-of-Famer Bruce Sutter threw out the ceremonial first pitch. I celebrated by eating a hot dog. After Scott Thompson of Peachtree Station belted out the National Anthem and the color guard left the field, I toasted our great nation with a hamburger.

And that's how the night went. The ballplayers played, the managers and coaches managed and coached, and the all-you-can-eater ate all I could eat. And more.

By the fourth inning, a thought came to my mind that soon had me nearly trembling in fear. I scanned the ballpark.

'Let's play two'? Please, please no

I was looking for Ernie Banks.

Banks is a National Baseball Hall of Famer who loved to play the game so much his oft-used phrase, "Let's play two!" became a cliché.

For me, a doubleheader could be disastrous. There's no telling how many hot dogs I might be able to finish over the course of 18 innings.

Ernie always wants to play two. At this point, I was praying I could get through just one without breaking my seat.

But something happened as the game went on. And, honestly, it didn't take long. Sure, I was still munching here and there. But, you know what? It wasn't about the food anymore. I won that matchup early.

I realized that it was all about the game the whole time. I can dominate any buffet and for a lot less that 25 bucks. But, when Concepcion Rodriguez belts a line drive over the left field wall, I enjoy that more than any hot dog. There's more heartburn when a pop fly lands in front of the third baseman for an error than after any plate of nachos.

Food is great. Gimmicks are nice. But the game's the thing. When it all comes down to it, home plate is the only plate that matters. It always has been, and it always will be.

When I think about it, even though the Charleston RiverDogs, a Yankees' farm club, beat the Braves 10-4, I'm not miserable at all. In fact, I'm feeling pretty good.

Welcome back, baseball. I’ve missed you.

Mickey Seward moonlights as a Rome-area writer. Hometown Headlines paid for his tickets and asked him to write about the Rome Braves All You Can Eat Seats. Tickets are $25 per person and include admission to the game and a special all-you-can-eat-menu. You can add beer with a $40 ticket. Fans get field-level seating ($8 tickets) and ballpark food such as hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecue, nachos and more. For more, click www.romebraves.com. Photo by Mills Fitzner

Berry Dean Fixes Mistakes Before They Happen

This article was written for a regional magazine, The Druck Report, appearing in the October, 2007 issue.

by Mickey Seward

It’s not often a lunch invitation turns into much more than a quick meal and good conversation. For Dr. John Grout, the dean of Berry College’s Campbell School of Business, a lunch invitation 12 years ago ended up changing his life.

Who knows how many lives that lunch conversation has saved?

It was in 1995 that Grout, then a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, accepted an invitation from a pair of doctors at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School to join them for lunch. The doctors were creating a proposal based on error reporting in blood transfusions for the National Institutes of Health, and they were looking for assistance from Grout, who already was one of the nation’s leaders in the research of “mistake proofing.”

Since that afternoon, Grout has devoted much of his time to mistake-proofing the health care industry. His work is so respected that he recently was asked to author a book for the Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The result, Mistake-Proofing the Design of Health Care Processes, is now available to health care practitioners worldwide. It includes 150 existing examples of mistake-proofing in the medical profession.

The text has raised some questions, Grout says. The first one he often receives about the book regards its purpose.

“I’ve been asked if it is meant to be a catalog of examples or a catalyst for more examples,” he said. “My answer, of course, is both. It has a large amount of examples but I really believe that in the future, this book will be used as a catalyst to create even more examples.”

Grout said he doesn’t expect the book to become an overnight sensation. But over time, he believes, it will make an impact.

“This is very new to medicine. This is not one of those books where they will say, ‘Look what just came out!’ This is something they will grow into. The real test is what happens in the next three to five years. I don’t look at it and think, ‘If this doesn’t get big in the next six months, there’s a problem.’

“There’s a huge benefit for the worker – it makes him more at-home while he’s at work and creates a less stressful environment. Mistake-proofing helps free medical professionals’ minds from an endless stream of details on how to do their job and helps patients get better more rapidly.”

So far, local medical practitioners have been able to see first hand the positive results of mistake-proofing their environment.

“With mistake-proofing, the human element doesn’t have to become involved,” says Sonny Rigas, chief operating officer at Floyd Medical Center. “If mistake-proofing is automatically built into things, then we don’t have to think about making a costly mistake.

“We use a lot of different mistake-proofing measures” at Floyd, Rigas says. “For example, a portable x-ray machine cannot be moved unless a drive bar on the machine is depressed. There is an automatic exposure control on radiation devices that protects patients from receiving more radiation than what is prescribed. Those are a few big examples.

“There are more basic examples, too,” Rigas says. “We use bar code readers throughout the facility. There are lights over doors to indicate there is a procedure taking place inside that room. We use wristbands. There are examples of mistake-proofing all over in the health care industry, and specifically here.”

For Grout, mistake-proofing health care environments is an opportunity to assist a large group of professionals for which he holds a great deal of respect.

“I’ve been working with a lot of medical professionals over the past several years, and I’ve been so impressed by how much they care about their patients,” Grout says. “I don’t ever want it (mistake-proofing) viewed as denigrating those folks. They work in an environment that’s not designed for mistake-proofing, and errors can happen because of that. These are professionals doing the best they can, and ways are being designed to help them do it even better.”

Many of those new designs may be viewed on Grout’s Website, www.mistakeproofing.com, which also features a link to a wiki that he says will serve as a sort of “Volume 2” to his book, and allow other users to post their mistake-proofing designs.

Grout’s launch into the world of mistake-proofing came well before that lunch invitation.

“I first became interested in mistake-proofing from a manufacturing perspective,” he says. “I taught a class in quality management at SMU. In preparing for that course, I really became fascinated with the subject of mistake-proofing. I like the inventive aspect to creating mistake-proofing devices.”

Grout also likes what he sees happening at the Campbell School of Business, which last year became one of just 549 business schools worldwide to be accredited by the prestigious Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

“Now we are poised to move forward in new and better ways,” Grout says. “We’ve never had a stronger faculty then we have now. My job is to assist the faculty in making the Campbell School of Business better and better in the coming years. That will happen.”

Turns out, it doesn’t take a lunch invitation to get Grout excited about the future.