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 Major League Baseball is now about to disconnect the landlines that link dugouts to bullpens. Long after the rest of society embraced cellphones, managers and coaches will soon be able to discuss pitching changes on Samsung Galaxy S III phones.

The 21st-century 4G dugout-to-bullpen connection that is being created by T-Mobile USA as part of its wireless sponsorship with Major League Baseball was announced Tuesday at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

 "This is baseball's continued push into the digital age," said Tim Brosnan, Major League Baseball's executive vice president for business. "It's also about a very aggressive wireless provider that sought us out to create this unique communications platform."

Baseball had not thought of a dugout-to-bullpen phone system in its talks with various wireless providers about a national sponsorship over the past decade, Brosnan said.

The wireless system will be tested at the World Baseball Classic in Arizona in March. After assessing how it works and fixing any problems, baseball will roll it out in the major leagues. Whether each stadium will have it in 2013 has not been determined.

T-Mobile's sponsorship plans also include enhancing network connectivity for fans at all ballparks and helping MLB Advanced Media create content for smartphones and tablets.

To create the dugout-to-bullpen communications system, each ballpark will get the equivalent of a small cellular system with a miniature cell tower.

But while wireless companies like T-Mobile are continuously trying to broaden their national coverage territory, the dugout-to-bullpen system will have limits enforced by a technology called geo-fencing. So, managers and pitching coaches will not be able to chat with the bullpen coach from the pitcher's mound. And bullpen coaches cannot ask, "Can you hear me now?" once they leave the bullpen's environs.

"The guidance we've been given is that we shouldn't fundamentally change what makes baseball baseball," said Mark McDiarmid, T-Mobile's vice president for engineering. "There is reason to be cautious about how far the coach could move away from the dugout before the umpires might think it's inappropriate."

Baseball is not shifting to cellphones because of an incident during the eighth inning of Game 5 of the 2011 World Series when the noise at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington caused Derek Lilliquist, the Cardinals' bullpen coach, to misunderstand Manager Tony La Russa's instructions about which relievers should start warming up.

Twice, La Russa asked that Jason Motte get up. Lilliquist apparently did not hear the first request. When La Russa called again to get Motte ready, Lilliquist thought he was asking for Lance Lynn. The miscommunication led to La Russa's surprise when he summoned a right-hander and Lynn arrived at the mound, not Motte. Lynn stayed in long enough to issue an intentional walk; Motte quickly got ready and replaced him.

Lilliquist might well have heard La Russa's instructions if they had used the cellphone system, with multiple microphones, noise mitigation and the ability to raise audio levels.

 Given T-Mobile's investment over the next three years, it is not surprising that each dugout's branded cellphone docking station — about the size of a personal computer tower — will be about as visible to TV cameras as the Gatorade vessel is.

But, Brosnan said, baseball has not ordained the obvious commercial tie-in: that each call to the bullpen on Fox, ESPN and TBS's national telecasts be sponsored by T-Mobile.

The subject was not Alabama's 42-14 victory, but comments made during the game by the ESPN play-by-play announcer Brent Musburger regarding the girlfriend of Alabama quarterback A J McCarron. In the first quarter, ESPN showed McCarron's girlfriend, Katherine Webb, who was sitting near his parents. Musburger called the 23-year-old Webb, a former Miss Alabama, a "lovely lady" and "beautiful," and said to his broadcast partner, Kirk Herbstreit, a former quarterback at Ohio State, "You quarterbacks get all the good-looking women."

"A J's doing some things right," Herbstreit replied. Musburger, 73, then said, "If you're a youngster in Alabama, start getting the football out and throw it around the backyard with Pop."

Almost immediately, Webb's name began trending on Twitter and her account added nearly 100,000 followers within hours, including athletes like LeBron James. Meanwhile, Musburger's comments, which some saw as harmless fun, struck other observers as off-putting.

"It's extraordinarily inappropriate to focus on an individual's looks," said Sue Carter, a professor of journalism at Michigan State. "In this instance, the appearance of the quarterback's girlfriend had no bearing on the outcome of the game. It's a major personal violation, and it's so retrograde that it's embarrassing. I think there's a generational issue, but it's incumbent on people practicing in these eras to keep up and this is not a norm."

ESPN planned in advance to mention that Webb, an Auburn graduate, is dating McCarron. But when Musburger's gushing over her went too far, some staffers in the production truck at the stadium "cringed." Soon after, John Wildhack, ESPN's executive vice president of production, told Musburger through the announcer's earpiece that he had to "move on," according to a person briefed on the conversation.

The network apologized for Musburger's comments Tuesday.

"We always try to capture interesting story lines and the relationship between an Auburn grad who is Miss Alabama and the current Alabama quarterback certainly met that test," the ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz said. "However, we apologize that the commentary in this instance went too far and Brent understands that."

For her part, Webb did not seem to mind what Musburger said.

"It was kind of nice," Webb told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "I didn't look at it as creepy at all. For a woman to be called beautiful, I don't see how that's an issue."

Carter was among those who said she thought Musburger should be reprimanded.

"I think because sports has been such a male-dominated domain, he obviously felt license and privilege and he's been able to do that for years," Carter said. "But the masculine aspect of sports is changing."

Musburger has made other controversial comments. His criticism of the demonstration by Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal stand at the Mexico City Olympics included a reference to Nazi Germany. While announcing a Florida State-Miami game in 2005, Musburger commented on a scantily clad Florida State fan, Jenn Sterger, who parlayed her notoriety into a television career. In 2006, representatives from the University of Southern California said that Musburger disclosed the team's secret signals during a broadcast of a game against Nebraska. He raised eyebrows during the 2011 Fiesta Bowl when he said that a last-second field-goal attempt by Auburn was for "all the Tostitos," invoking the game's sponsor.

Timothy Burke, an editor at the Web site Deadspin, wrote a story on Musburger's comments Monday night and included the video clip from the broadcast. Deadspin has been criticized for publishing content that others have found offensive or too sexually explicit, but Burke said he thought Musburger's comments went too far.

"For Brent Musburger to find this woman attractive is normal," Burke said. "For him to assert that every man should, and that every boy should try to be a football hero to get such a gorgeous woman, is where it is really not a good thing for me."

Even on Alabama's campus, there were those who felt Musburger went too far.

"Football is a male domain," said Jennifer Greer, the chairwoman of the journalism department at Alabama. "And the role that women play even in the journalistic respect is in the supportive role, the mom, the hot girlfriend, the sideline reporter. They're accepted in this world, but in particular roles. It reinforces this stereotype of the hot model girlfriend attached to a quarterback and the maleness of sports that is hard for serious female athletes."

While critical of Musburger's comments, Greer said the mere fact that there was controversy surrounding them was a sign of progress for women and sports.

"We'll be using this as an example in our classes when we talk about journalists and sensitivity to issues," she said.

Officials said the new assessment by federal regulators could halt or scale back Shell's program to open Alaska's Arctic waters to oil exploration, a $4.5 billion effort that has been plagued by equipment failures, legal delays, mismanagement and bad weather.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that the expedited review, which is to be completed within 60 days, was prompted by accidents and equipment problems aboard Shell's two Arctic drilling rigs, the Kulluk and the Noble Discoverer, as well as the Arctic Challenger, a vessel designed to respond to a potential well blowout and oil spill.

In addition, the Coast Guard announced Tuesday that it would conduct a comprehensive marine casualty investigation of the grounding of the Kulluk on Dec. 31.

Shell's repeated and early misadventures have confirmed the fears of Arctic drilling critics, who said that the company and its federal partners had not shown that they had the equipment, skill or experience to cope with the unforgiving environment there.

Tommy Beaudreau, director of the Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, will lead the review. "As part of our department's oversight responsibilities," Mr. Beaudreau said in a statement, "our review will look at Shell's management and operations in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. We will assess Shell's performance in the Arctic's challenging environment."

The assessment will look at Shell's safety management systems, its oversight of contracted services and its ability to meet federal standards for Arctic oil and gas operations.

Marvin E. Odum, president of Shell Oil, said of the government assessment: "It's not a concern to me. I welcome this kind of high-level review. It's important that both we and the Department of Interior take a look at the 2012 season."

Mr. Odum added: "There are obviously some issues that need to be worked on, particularly the marine transport." He said that it was too early to say what damage may have occurred to the Kulluk but that he had "great confidence in this program."

Shell's rigs drilled two shallow wells last summer, but were halted by government officials before they reached oil-bearing formations. Officials would not allow Shell to drill deeper because the company did not have the required capacity to contain spills after the testing failure of a device designed to cap a runaway well and collect the oil.

In the past several months, the Coast Guard has examined the containment barge and the rebuilt dome, and both passed necessary tests. But the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement still needs to inspect the equipment before it can be deployed. Those inspections were originally to be done later this month, but have been put off because of the Kulluk accident.

Environmental advocates have been leery of the Artic drilling program for years and became especially vocal after the Kulluk ran aground.

Greenpeace, which is circulating petitions calling on President Obama to halt the Arctic drilling program, said that the Interior Department's reassessment was long overdue.

"We've repeatedly been told Shell is the best in the business, and so we can only conclude after this series of mishaps that the best in the business is simply not good enough for the Arctic," said Dan Howells, Greenpeace deputy campaigns director. "We only hope that 60 days is long enough to properly examine the extraordinary number of dangerous incidents that have beset Shell's accident-prone drilling program and put Alaska's environment at risk."

Michael LeVine, senior Pacific counsel for the environmental advocacy group Oceana, said that government regulators were too lax in allowing the program to go forward without adequate assurances that Shell could operate safely and competently.

"We hope this review amounts to more than a paper exercise," Mr. LeVine said. "The Department of the Interior, after all, is complicit in Shell's failures because it granted the approvals that allowed Shell to operate."

The Kulluk was towed to a safe harbor on Monday, where it will undergo extensive inspections before continuing its journey to its winter home in Seattle.

If the Kulluk, which Shell has upgraded in recent years at a cost of nearly $300 million, is found to have been wrecked or substantially damaged, it will be hard for the company to find a replacement and receive the numerous government permits needed to resume drilling in July, as it has planned.

Under Department of Interior rules governing Arctic drilling, the company must have two rigs on site at all times to provide for a backup vessel to drill a relief well in case of a blowout, an uncontrolled escape of oil or gas.

The Kulluk, which does not have a propulsion system of its own, ran into trouble in late December when its tow ship, the Aiviq, lost engine power and the towline separated in high winds and heavy seas.

Shell's other Arctic drill ship, the Noble Discoverer, has also had problems. In July, before sailing to the Arctic, it nearly ran aground after dragging its anchor in the Aleutian Islands. Then in November it had a small engine fire.

Later that month, during an inspection in the Alaskan port of Seward, the Coast Guard found more than a dozen violations involving safety systems and pollution equipment.

At the end of December, the Noble Corporation, the Swiss company that owns the 512-foot-long drill ship and is leasing it to Shell for $240,000 a day, said that many of the problems had been repaired and that the ship was preparing to sail to Seattle to fix the remainder of them.

 While President Obama has made no secret of his desire to withdraw American troops as rapidly as possible, the plans for a postwar American presence in Afghanistan have generally envisioned a residual force of thousands of troops to carry out counterterrorism operations and to help train and equip Afghan soldiers.

 In a conference call with reporters, the deputy national security adviser, Benjamin J. Rhodes, said that leaving no troops "would be an option that we would consider," adding that "the president does not view these negotiations as having a goal of keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan."

 Military analysts have said it is difficult to conceive of how the United States might achieve even its limited post-2014 goals in Afghanistan without any kind of troop presence. That suggests the White House is staking out a negotiating position with both the Pentagon and with Mr. Karzai, as he and Mr. Obama begin to work out an agreement covering the post-2014 American role in Afghanistan.

 Discussing the administration's planning, Mr. Rhodes said the "core goal" of the United States was to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda" and to "ensure that they can never return to Afghanistan."

 To that end, American military officers in Kabul and at the Pentagon have been developing plans for a commando force that could carry out raids against terrorist groups. Such a force would also need logistical support and arrangements for rapid medical evacuation, as well as helicopters that could whisk them to the battlefield and warplanes that could carry out airstrikes if they needed additional firepower.

 Another objective, Mr. Rhodes said, would be to "ensure that Afghan national security forces are trained and equipped."

According to a recent Pentagon report, only one of the Afghan National Army's 23 brigades is capable of operating without support from the United States and other NATO nations.  

 To help the Afghan military become more self-sufficient, the United States and its NATO allies have been discussing plans to advise Afghan troops after 2014. Gen. John R. Allen, the American commander in Kabul, initially outlined a series of options that ranged from 6,000 to 20,000 troops to carry out such missions.

 After the White House pressed for lower troop options, the Pentagon offered three plans that would leave 3,000, 6,000 and 9,000. Given the demanding nature of the mission in Afghanistan, the Pentagon officials have indicated the upper end of that limit is more realistic.

 Douglas E. Lute, the senior White House aide on Afghanistan, suggested that the requirement for troops could be low if the United States made progress against Al Qaeda over the next two years and the Afghan military improved.

 "The ranges are completely derivative from different assumptions about the variables," Mr. Lute said. "And that process with John Allen continues even as recently as today."

 Anthony H. Cordesman, a prominent military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a recent report that the administration had disclosed so little about its plans for a military or civilian transition in Afghanistan that the debate over troop numbers was not meaningful.

"This lack of public and transparent plans and reporting makes it impossible to determine whether there is a real transition plan or a disguised exit strategy," he wrote.

 Mr. Karzai will meet Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the White House on Friday. On Thursday, he will confer at the Pentagon with Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta. He is also scheduled to speak at Georgetown University on Afghanistan's future.

The events were the latest in a series of problems with the 787, which entered commercial service in November 2011 and has been hit by technical and electric malfunctions since then. Boeing delivered 46 planes last year, more than any analyst had predicted, and has outlined ambitious plans to double its production rate to 10 planes a month by the end of this year.

Much rides on the success of the 787 for Boeing, which expects to sell 5,000 of the planes in the next 20 years. The basic model has a list price of $206.8 million, but early customers typically received deep discounts to make up for the production delays and teething problems. All this means it could be years before Boeing starts recouping its investment costs and turning a profit on the planes.

Shares of Boeing dropped 2.6 percent to $74.13 on Tuesday, extending Monday's drop of 2 percent.

The 787 makes extensive use of new technology, including a bigger reliance on electrical systems, and is built mostly out of lightweight carbon composite materials. While the problems so far do not point to serious design problems with the airplane, they represent an embarrassment to Boeing's manufacturing ability.

"None of this is a showstopper, and none of this should signal this product is fundamentally flawed," said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at the Teal Group, a consulting firm. "But whether these are design glitches or manufacturing glitches, either way it's a serious hit to Boeing's image."

Both of this week's incidents affected planes operated by Japan Airlines at Logan International Airport in Boston.

The fuel leak on Tuesday was spotted by another pilot as JAL Flight 007, bound for Tokyo, was taxiing and getting ready to take off, said Richard Walsh, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Port Authority. The plane was towed back to its gate and the 40-gallon leak cleaned up.

The flight with 178 passengers and 11 crew members, scheduled to take off at noon, eventually left Boston at 3:47 p.m.

On Monday, an electrical fire on a 787 was traced to a battery connected to the plane's auxiliary power unit, which runs electrical systems when the plane is not getting power from its engines.

The fire broke out about 30 minutes after the flight landed from Tokyo, and all 183 passengers and crew members had left. The smoke was first detected in the cabin by maintenance and cleaning personnel who were on the parked plane and contacted the airport's fire department.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating Monday's incident, said the battery had "severe fire damage."

New planes often experience problems, particularly in the first few years of production. But the succession of issues with the 787, which has already been marred by production delays of years, has revived concerns about the plane's reliability and safety.

Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered inspections of fuel line connectors on all 787s, warning of a risk of leaks and fires. Separately, a United Airlines 787 was also diverted in December after one of six electrical generators failed in flight.

In a statement, Boeing said on Tuesday that it saw no relationship between Monday's battery problem and previous incidents with the 787's power system, which involved faults in power panels elsewhere in the electrical equipment bay.

"Boeing is cooperating with the N.T.S.B. in the investigation of this incident," the company said. "Before providing more detail, we will give our technical teams the time they need to do a thorough job and ensure we are dealing with facts, not speculation."

A Boeing spokesman, Marc Birtel, said the plane maker was aware of the fuel leak incident but declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for Japan Airlines in Tokyo said the company was still gathering the details surrounding the two incidents, and that there were no plans to change its orders for 787s. The airline has seven 787s already in service, and 38 more on order. The spokeswoman declined to be named, citing company policy.

United Airlines, currently the only airline in the United States operating 787s, said it had performed inspections on all six of its 787s after Monday's incident. It did not cancel any of its flights today, said Mary Ryan, a spokeswoman for the airline. She said United "continues to work closely with Boeing on the reliability of our 787s."

But she declined to comment on a report in The Wall Street Journal that said the airline had found improperly installed wiring in components associated with the auxiliary power unit.

The surge in fatal combat is a troubling development in Kashmir, a disputed mountainous area that has been a focus of bitter tensions between the neighbors over six decades. A cease-fire has been in place for almost 10 years.

But while both sides have exchanged angry accusations of cross-border infiltration, the flare-ups have received muted news coverage and showed few signs of escalating into a diplomatic crisis.

The Indian military said fighting erupted on Tuesday on its side of the de facto border, known as the Line of Control, when an Indian patrol clashed with Pakistani soldiers who had crept across under cover of fog. The Pakistanis retreated after a brief firefight in which two Indian soldiers were killed, an Indian Army officer said.

"The government of India considers the incident as a provocative action, and we condemn it," the Indian Defense Ministry said in a statement. "The government will take up the incident with the Pakistan government. We expect Islamabad to honor the cease-fire agreement strictly."

Pakistan's military quickly rejected that version of events. A military official, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity, called it "Indian propaganda" to divert attention from a clash on Sunday in which a Pakistani soldier reportedly died.

"Pakistan military officials deny Indian allegation of unprovoked firing," the official said in a text message sent to journalists. The official military spokesman was not available for further comment.

It is difficult to discern the truth about clashes in the heights of Kashmir, partly because the terrain is so rugged and remote, but mostly because the area is tightly militarized on both sides and is largely out of bounds for reporters.

But the latest salvo of physical and public relations exchanges did highlight the emotional pull of the Kashmir conflict for the militaries in both countries, which have fought two major wars over the territory. Less clear was whether the skirmishes would have any effect on broader bilateral political and economic initiatives.

After high-level diplomatic visits over the past year, the rivals have loosened visa restrictions for business travelers and have taken tentative steps to unlock vast trade potential. The advances have come at a time when Pakistani public opinion has been largely preoccupied with anger toward the United States, particularly after the American commando raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Tensions have eased significantly in recent months, but a rise in American drone strikes against militant targets in the tribal belt, which continued on Tuesday, could threaten that.

Early Tuesday, remotely piloted aircraft controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency killed at least 12 people in two separate attacks in North Waziristan, the main hub of militant activity, said a senior security official based in the tribal belt. It was the fourth of day of drone attacks this month, a sharp escalation over the strike rate late last year.

In the first episode, several drones fired on a house in the Mir Ali district, killing eight people, including Sheik Yasin al-Kuwaiti, a senior figure in Al Qaeda, said the official, who spoke on the customary condition of anonymity. "Eight missiles were fired into the compound where he was living with his family," the official said. "The house has been turned into rubble."

Fifteen minutes later, a second strike on another house in the same area killed four people and wounded two, local tribesmen said. All of the dead were described as local Islamist militants.

Now, it's Nashville's turn.

Here in a city once embarrassed by its Grand Ole Opry roots, a place that sat on the sidelines while its Southern sisters boomed economically, it is hard to find a resident who does not break into the goofy grin of the newly popular when the subject of Nashville's status comes up.

Mayor Karl Dean, a Democrat in his second term, is the head cheerleader.

"It's good to be Nashville right now," he said during a recent tour of his favorite civic sites, the biggest of which is a publicly financed gamble: a new $623 million downtown convention center complex that is the one of the most expensive public projects in Tennessee history.

The city remains traditionally Southern in its sensibility, but it has taken on the luster of the current. On a Venn diagram, the place where conservative Christians and hipsters overlap would be today's Nashville.

Flush with young new residents and alive with immigrants, tourists and music, the city made its way to the top of all kinds of lists in 2012.

A Gallup poll ranked it in the top five regions for job growth. A national entrepreneurs' group called it one of the best places to begin a technology start-up. Critics admire its growing food scene. GQ magazine declared it simply "Nowville."

And then there is the television show. "Nashville," a song-filled ABC drama about two warring country divas, had its premiere in October with nine million viewers. It appears to be doing for the city of 610,000 people what the prime-time soap opera "Dallas" did for that Texas city in the 1980s.

"You can't buy that," Mr. Dean said. "The city looks great in it."

Different regions capture the nation's fancy for different reasons. Sometimes, as with Silicon Valley, innovation and economic engines drive it. Other times, it's a bold civic event, like the Olympics, or a cultural wave, like the way grunge music elevated Seattle.

Here in a fast-growing metropolitan region with more than 1.6 million people, the ingredients for Nashville's rise are as much economic as they are cultural and, critics worry, could be as fleeting as its fame.

"People are too smug about how fortunate we are now," said the Southern journalist John Egerton, 77, who has lived in Nashville since the 1970s.

"We ought to be paying more attention to how many people we have who are ill-fed and ill-housed and ill-educated," he said.

Many will argue that the city's schools need improvement, and although it remains more progressive on social issues than Tennessee as a whole, the city, with its largely white population, still struggles with a legacy of segregation and has had public battles over immigration and sexual orientation.From an economic standpoint, it has been a measured rise. When the housing boom hit the South, Nashville, long a sleepy capital city with a Bible Belt sensibility, did not reap the financial gains seen in cities like Atlanta, whose metropolitan region is more than three times its size.

But Nashville's modest growth meant a softer fall and a quicker path out of recession. By July 2012, real estate closings were up 28 percent over the previous year. Unemployment in Davidson County, which includes Nashville, is about 5.7 percent, compared with 7.8 percent nationally, and job growth is predicted to rise by 18 percent in next five years, said Garrett Harper, vice president for research with the Nashville Chamber of Commerce.

He and others attribute Nashville's stability and current economic health to a staid mix of employers in fields like health care management, religious publishing, car manufacturing and higher education, led by Vanderbilt University.

By some estimates, half of the nation's health care plans are run by companies in the Nashville area.

"Health care is countercyclical," he said. "It inoculates the city against a lot of the winds that blow."

But the music industry is the bedrock of Nashville's economy. In the past two decades, country music has grown into a national darling. The city has attracted musicians and producers whose work moves beyond the twang and heartache.

On a recent evening, Nashville's once-seedy honky-tonk district was jammed with young hopefuls pulling guitars out of Hondas, a bus from "America's Got Talent" and Aerosmith fans heading to the Bridgestone Arena.

It is not uncommon to see the power couple Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman show up at a popular restaurant, or to pass Vince Gill on the street.

Music celebrities are attracted to a state with no income tax and a ready-made talent pool. But they also just like it.

Jennifer Nettles, of the country duo Sugarland, spent 17 years in Atlanta and has been dipping in and out of New York and Nashville for years. She recently bought a farm here, had a baby and is settling in with her husband, Justin Miller.

"Part of what is really attractive about Nashville right now is that it isn't Atlanta, and I love Atlanta," she said. "There's a bit of charm and a richness a city the size of Nashville allows for."

As if to underscore Nashville's position in the nation's musical hierarchy, the city hosted the annual Grammy nomination concert in December. It was the first time the show was not held in Los Angeles.

But to be a truly great city, some skeptics argue, it has to be a place that tends to its residents first and tourists second.

The city's politicians are banking on the tourists. At the center of the plan is the Music City Center, a huge convention center whose main section is shaped like a giant guitar laid on its back.

It sits on 19 downtown acres and is attached to both the Country Music Hall of Fame and an 800-room, $270 million Omni Hotel, which is expected to open in the fall.

To pay for it all, the city offered generous tax breaks and based public financing on increased hotel and rental car fees and taxes. To lure the hotel, for example, the city discounted property taxes by more than 60 percent for 25 years.

The idea was to help the city land bigger conventions, like the National Rifle Association conference, which will bring 48,000 people to the city in 2015.

But using generous economic incentives and relying on conventions has been called an outdated economic strategy.

"This was probably a good idea in 1985. And probably a good idea in 1995, said Emily Evans, a member of the region's Metropolitan Council. "But in 2012, the momentum for that kind of economic development has past."

She once called the convention center a "riverboat gamble."

"In giving away your tax base for the purpose of expanding your tax base in the future," Ms. Evans said, "you make it difficult to deliver on the fundamentals, the things that make your city livable, like parks and roads and schools."

Mr. Dean, a former city lawyer who became mayor in 2007 and led the city's recovery from historic floods in 2010, said the project, which got under way during the recession, has been a fight every step of the way.

"The gains for the city are real and tangible," he said.

The mayor has orchestrated more than a dozen tax incentive deals over the past few years. Most recently, he arranged a $66 million incentive package to help the health care giant HCA Holdings move part of its Nashville operations to new midtown high-rise buildings.

He acknowledges that more needs to be done on transportation and education, but in the meantime, he, like most of Nashville's residents, is enjoying its ride.

"I love the rhythm of this town and the pace of it and the tone of it," said Mr. Egerton, the writer. "I think Nashville is a big unfinished song."