Competitive sports
Major League Baseball has a media problem. It's September and nobody is talking about it. Baseball is just not interesting enough these days. How do you compete against stories about violence against women-- now caught on video?! Against "reckless or negligent injury to a child?" Stories about how three in ten of your sport's participants will wind up experiencing Alzheimer's or dementia? Racist team nicknames? Homophobia? Player bullying? An owner being sued for sexual harassment? The National Football League has become a journalistic wet dream. There is even room now in the media pool for "liberal" sports reporters. (How I wish this had been the case a decade ago.) How are people supposed to discuss Major League Baseball next to the water cooler at work when NFL "scandals" are causing these water coolers to explode?
Many media outlets are declaring the decline and fall of baseball. I chose to link to three of them in the previous sentence, but actually I could probably pull almost-exactly-worded articles from one hundred years ago. The internet doesn't go back that far. The sport is "too slow." It's "out of pace" with these hectic times, we're told. This is patently untrue, however. Baseball continues to be as popular as its ever been-- at least in terms of attendance and profitability, and what else should baseball owners be expected to care about? At the very least, any recent dip in popularity or status has absolutely nothing to do with the product on the field. These calls for putting a clock on the competition or changing the rules somehow are asinine.
I listened to a couple idiots debate this topic on sports radio about a month ago. It wasn't really a debate because both men agreed: The NFL was #1 in popularity, and college football was an easy #2. Then they did argue a bit, I guess, as to whether the NBA or MLB came next in popularity. But the college football part is what got me. One of the guys suggested that college football had the popularity #2 slot purely based on "butts in the seats." Okay, that's absurd. Yes, college football stadiums fill up quickly on any given Saturday each fall, but what about Sunday through Monday?
Yesterday, the biggest college football game in the state of Iowa for the year was played in Iowa City. Seventy thousand people witnessed the two largest state universities go at it head-to-head. It was an easy sell-out, but neither of the two schools will sell out all of their home games this year, and both schools play only six home games. Six! When the game ended, I switched TV channels to watch the St. Louis Cardinals play the Colorado Rockies in St. Louis, a baseball game played roughly four hours south of Iowa City's Kinnick Stadium. According to the box score, 45,552 people were in attendance at that baseball game, 103.6% capacity for Busch Stadium. The Cardinals opponent had a record going in of only 59 and 88. The game had no special meaning. It was just one contest in the middle of a pennant race for the home team. Yet tickets were going for a minimum of $50 online. And the two teams will play again this afternoon in front of almost the same number of fans. And then the Cardinals will fill their ballpark in similar fashion six more times during the next week. That's as many home games in one week as college football teams prepare for in one year. How tough do you think Busch Stadium tickets would be to get if the Cardinals played only six home games a year instead of 81? That's what you call putting "butts in the seats."
It's funny that we only seem to read laments about baseball's dying popularity when the sports media's favorite teams suck. The Yankees season is slipping away, just barely above .500, and their most popular player over the last two decades is calling it quits. The Red Sox are worse. They're 65-84. And the Mets are 72-77 and still financially broken, thanks to Bernie Madoff's famous pyramid scheme. What baseball has now, that it didn't even have fifteen years ago, is on-the-field success for some of its historically-weaker markets. Baltimore, Kansas City, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Toronto, Cleveland, Washington, and Oakland are all in the thick of the playoff race this month. Isn't this exactly what people said was missing in Major League Baseball when the new century began? Sports observers at the New York Times and the New Yorker might think baseball is in a downswing, but ask people in any of these other cities if that's true. Baseball this fall actually has the opportunity to be the palette-cleanser that sports fans would seem to be looking for in the wake of the NFL's many recent humiliations. Mo'Ne Davis and the talented kids at the Little League World Series last month have already proven to be something of the sort.
Admittedly, baseball does have a marketing problem, but it's not the aging of its fan base that is the problem. Baseball will always be more popular with your older, more discriminating sports fan. It's a sport we now grow into. More literate, less pandering, more sustainable. Arguing that baseball has a problem because its fans will soon be dying off is like saying that Pfizer Pharmaceutical has a problem because Viagra customers will soon be dying off. I'm pretty sure there will be a new generation coming up behind. Am I calling the NFL a passing fad? Yes I am. Boxing was #1 or #2 in America also for a generation or two. Horse racing enjoyed a half-century of popular support. Pro golf has tumbled from a top tier television sport to irrelevant with the loss of just one player.
Baseball has a marketing problem that is connected instead to how its media partners cover their sport. (It would also help if the two teams that play in the major TV market of Chicago actually tried to field a winning team once in a while.) On the second-to-last day of the regular-season schedule, Saturday the 27th, two weeks from now, important games will be on the schedule. One or more playoff slots or positioning will be still undetermined, yet the FOX Network will be beaming a Yankees/Red Sox game to most of the nation. This is not a prediction. Look at the TV slate. It's already there. Two also-rans will be on national television that day, competing against a host of college football games, so that we can watch Derek Jeter play his second-to-last game. TBS will probably have the same match-up the following day. This is why America has never heard of Mike Trout-- not because Americans that are Mike Trout's age think baseball is "boring."
Major League Baseball may indeed be more "regional" in popularity than the NFL or the National Basketball Association. Trout and other MLB talent may be far less known nationally than LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, but I wouldn't trade positions with the NBA for my league. The NBA has made marketing its stars nationally its top priority, but the league's most passionate fans recognize that that's been at the cost of competitive balance-- and yes, even competitive integrity. The NBA's not healthier than MLB because it has more players seen on national TV ad campaigns. MLB is healthier than the NBA because it has fewer dead franchises. Baseball, admittedly, has a Florida problem (Miami and Tampa). But with LeBron James moving back to Cleveland, basketball now has a Florida problem too (Miami and Orlando). And a Philadelphia problem. And Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Sacramento, Denver, and New Orleans. Both the NFL and the NBA now sometimes fail to sell out some of their playoff games. Their TV popularity, unlike baseball, has come at the expense of attendance.
If Major League Baseball can boast, which it can, a recent resurgence for it's longest-moribund franchises, historically-notable competitive balance, record profits through television and online media deals, and record gate receipts over the last decade, not just in dollars earned, but in seats sold, and still be dying, what does that say about the future of soccer in America? It's been less than three months since the World Cup took place and the buzz for that sport, even with MLS games still being played, has already dried up.
posted by CM @ 10:00 AM
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