OT: WSJ Article, "Has Baseball's Moment Passed?"
I thought this article in the Wall Street Journal was an interesting exploration of the problems facing the MLB as they try to stay relevant in the sports landscape. A lot of kids these days don't have the attention span for baseball and as the article suggests, kids who don't play the game are much less likely to become fans/customers when they grow up. The author cites a 25% drop in Little League participation over the last decade. I don't think there's any question that is a problem for the MLB. I thought it was surprising that despite the growing concern over concussions, football and hockey participation is up. I thought this quote from former National League president Len Coleman was very. . .um. . .telling:
"The days of kids being born with a glove next to their ear in the crib and boys playing catch in the backyard by age three, those are over,"
He's not exactly a casual observer. Anyway, I think the article is an interesting read and it's pretty short:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487037125045762327531565827…
baseball = boring
well, that's like, your opinion then, man.
You = suck
baseball is boring,very boring. I grew up in a house that watched football,we didnt watch baseball much. I dated a girl who's dad was the pitching coach of the Reds at the time. It was cool to hang with the players and seat in great seats but I still found the game boring.
Baseball's day passed a long time ago. It hasn't truly been America's pasttime since the 1980s.
And probably half the kids that I knew playing baseball in that time frame were forced to do so by their parents and hated every minute of it.
If I had to decide between one of my professional teams winning an NBA championship, super bowl, or World Series I would pick the WS hands down.
I agree wholeheartedly. Nothing better than a WS crown. Super Bowl is great and all, but it just doesn't have the drama of a 7 game series.
Baseball is also the best game to attend on a warm sunny weekend afternoon with a cold beer.
Makes me sad that kids can't even pay attention to the game anymore. Hopefully my son enjoys the game, and I know we will be playing catch in the backyard.
Super Bowl is great and all, but it just doesn't have the drama of a 7 game series.
Agreed. However, the Stanley Cup playoffs are much more interesting, IME. No sport has a longer or more grueling path to the Championship than the NHL. Which is why it's awesome.
Stanley Cup trumps all
That's why I didn't include it.
Super Bowl is great and all, but it just doesn't have the drama of a 7 game series.
Of course, very few series, in any sport, actually go seven games. Far more often, they are one-sided affairs in which the last couple of games are a formality. The early rounds of the NBA Playoffs are particularly annoying in this way.
"Far more often, they are one-sided affairs in which the last couple of games are a formality."
Maybe in basketball, but not in hockey. Despite what it might seem like to the casual observer, the percentage of series that go 4 or 5 games is incredibly low. In hockey, you're actually more like to see a 4 or 5 game series in the conference finals or the SCF than in the first or second round, which is pretty interesting.
Note - It's been a while since I've seen the data on this, so I don't have the actual numbers (just going from recollection on the general points), but I wish I did. It was really interesting.
True. It works better in hockey, and low-scoring games in general. Basketball is so high-scoring that it serves to reduce variance.
Which is why I find NHL playoffs and to some extent, baseball playoffs frustrating. Those series are such crapshoots that you feel like the sports gods vacationing in Vegas.
A lot of people like that they never know what's going to happen but it frustrates me when a team that was so much better the whole season and even outplays a team for 58 minutes of a hockey game, loses because of some fluky goal.
Most basketball series aren't very exciting because you know who's going to win but there's nothing better in playoff sports than a basketball series between two heavyweights that you just don't know who's going to win. Those series often go 6 or 7 games and are decided by transcendent individual performances that are memorable for decades.
Given those choices, I'll take the pro NHL team winning Lord Stanley's Cup. Every time.
...not just the World Series that makes baseball great. A good pennant race can give a city a couple of months worth of excitement on an almost daily basis. It's the intensity of the schedule that can keep you (and your entire community) glued to a baseball team.
Baseball is also a strong radio sport and it's slower pace allows you to engage in other normal activities while keeping an eye (or an ear) on the game. Who doesn't have memories of tuning into an important game while driving home from work, casually stopping by the dry cleaners or sandwich shop (who also are tuning in) before finally arriving at home to catch the rest of the game on TV with family? Baseball has a unique ability to weave it's way into your life and that of your community even when you are not really watching the game.
Compare that to football which is a weekend sport. It is played exclusively on Saturday or Sunday and it demands your complete attention. That's great because it is intense & fun but it is also much easier to let go of during the week. It might be a bit of a paradox, but baseball's glacial & steady pace might actually be one of it's fundamental strengths even in age of short attention spans because you can casually & quickly check in on the team and then move on to something else. Other sports just aren't as easy for casual interest.
That is depressing to read for me. Such a great game.
I love baseball but I do prefer to go to the stadium to watch it as opposed to watching it on TV. The article was interesting but it does seem to discount the influx of foreign born players into the league. The one thing that baseball has going for it is that it is fairly cheap to play. Hockey is expensive and I think the increase of numbers on hockey may be misleading as they were pretty low to begin with. And I'm still not sure if the soccer numbers will translate to us becoming as fervent as other countries.
The MLS not sucking will lead to America's soccer fans becoming as fervent as other countries' fans. The infrastructure is being built but it's still going to take time to accumulate top talent at these clubs. Remember L.A. paying a quarter-billion for Beckham? These guys don't come cheap.
I will freely admit that I am not a soccer fan. I don't even watch it during the World Cup. The few times I did watch it, it seemed like a dive fest with the refs being even more arbitrary than NHL refs (if that is possible). It probably doesn't help that Detroit doesn't have a professional soccer team but I think they tried to field one at one point (It may have been the indoor league though). And it's not even a case for me that its hard to follow, its more of a case it's pretty boring to watch. People complain about the spells of deadtime in baseball....there's that in soccer but the guys are running instead...maybe if I watched the game more I would understand that they are developing plays. Anyways...
I don't think baseball is going anywhere but I do see it decline further as there is less and less homegrown talent. I think the other thing that doesn't help is the lack of games broadcast over the public airwaves. It used to be that you could catch about half of the season on Channel 50 around here, that all has slowly moved to Fox Sports. There are some markets where not only is not broadcast on public airwaves but it is broadcast on subscription channels. In the long run, that only hurts the game. It seems that hockey wants to move in that direction as well. Again, it used to be that you could catch a good chunk of the season on Channel 50.....
I used to watch Euroleague soccer on atdhenet.tv. Sometimes I would just watch games between no-namers for 5-10 minutes before switching back to MGoBlog, but I do find soccer relaxing. If you're interested in a higher-scoring game of soccer, there's always indoor, which is a bit more like hockey because players bank shots off of the walls all the time and the court is only about 150 feet long. Wide World of Sports in AA has a couple of courts and you can watch the games for free.
I don't know as much about baseball as I should. My dad is a long-suffering Cleveland Indians fan and I respect him for that. The sport just doesn't resonate with me the same way other sports do. That said, I think the market will still support big-name teams and fill stadiums. I can't remember the last time I parked in front of a TV and watched baseball for three hours, though.
Like someone said above, I hate the dives in soccer. I really don't like watching, and that's probably 1/2 to 3/4 ofthe reason why. If they let a little contact slide it would be a much better sport, IMO.
In the meantime, give me football and hockey every day of the week.
Hockey is definitely more legit than soccer, but I live in a cold climate in a country with money to burn so it's easy for me to say that. The flopping does take away from the game, but the same could be said about tacky penalties in any sport.
I just feel like in the contact sports (hockey/football) I know what the penalties are. Probably really easy for me to say about hockey as I played forever and also refereed for quite a long time, but I honestly think it's mostly simple.
Hockey: don't use your stick to gain an advantage over another player, keep your hands down when you hit, only hit someone with the puck.
Football: don't fuck up procedures, don't lead with your helmet, don't hit Tom Brady.
In soccer, and sometimes basketball, I have no idea what they call as contact fouls. It seems completely random, and in basketball, more based on who got hit than how. This is just venting now but every time I see these guys dive I'm much more likely to get annoyed and say...questionable things about their manhood then get excited about watching the rest of the game.
If you don't understand the penalties that are going on in a soccer game, then quite honestly you might need to watch games with someone who knows more about what's going on and can explain it to you. I played rec soccer in elementary school and I hated it because no one ever really explained what was going on and I was a backup anyways. When I was watching the World Cup last summer, I was with guys who had actually played the game at a high level and explained the rules about contact (generally, if you touch a player and cause him to fall down, it's a penalty, but the severity goes from a simple warning, to a loss of possession, to carding. The goalie has special privileges inside the box about players obstructing his view of goal shots and a few other minor things I can't recall right at this moment.). I was a little more experienced at that point (I played pickup soccer my last year at Michigan) and enjoyed the games a lot more. If nothing else, you probably would have enjoyed watching North Korea losing every game they played to some of the most legit teams in the world.
You're right of course, and you also hit on what I was trying to say, and didn't do a good job of. What I meant was that the penalties being called seemed random because I didn't know what the difference was between a warning and a penalty kick (might be a little extreme but that's the point) call.
Obviously me not being around it much would be the reason, but like I said before, the dives are BS. I don't know about soccer (though I have seen blatant dives before in World Cup matches or other high-level games) but hockey actually penalizes a dive, with no regard to whether the player dove following a legit penalty.
I played basketball and soccer and I think those sports are much simpler to call than hockey. Just can't interfere with someone's body in a way that gives you an advantage. Pretty much as simple as that. Those are ball-centric sports. You can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you're making a play on the ball without interfering with someone's body.
I have no clue about calls in hockey and hockey wasn't big in my household growing up. The fact is there are a lot of great sports out there but unless you understand a sport and have some reason to root for a team, it's tough to be a fan. That's why people in India love cricket, people in Canada love hockey, people in the US love football, etc. even though people in other parts of the world can't get into those sports.
My rebuttal would be to take a look at the disproportionate amount of calls that someone like Shaq or Sullinger gets compared to...a THJ or DMorris. As far as I can tell from being a casual fan, there is definitely an uneven standard in basketball given to players that are either a) huge or b) superstars. That confuses me no end; there might be some cases like that in hockey (think Gretzky or Yzerman) but I think it's pretty blatant in basketball.
As to soccer, I think if they refereed it more like they do hockey (again with the bias) it would be more watchable. If the rule was, "okay, hit someone as long as your point is to gain possession, not to take their head off" it would be easier to follow, IMO.
Lastly, I will be the first to admit there is stuff in hockey that is just plain weird. OTOH I think it's fairly easy to tell a penalty in 90-95% of the cases. If you do something to hurt someone, it's a penalty; if you use your stick for anything other than trying to control the puck, it's a penalty.
Hockey Rules! Glad to hear participation is up.
As for baseball being down, I think it just depends where you grow up. Where I am from in MI everyone I knew played hockey. When I went to work in Detroit, all the kids play hoops.
Now living in Denver many kids play baseball.
I can see how people can't watch baseball on TV (especially listening to Joe Buck's monotone voice on Fox) but going to the games is Americana.
In northern Illinois it was pretty balanced. I played hockey growing up so obviously most of my friends played. I'd say mostly hockey and football for the guys I knew, usually with a "lesser" sport or two mixed in. Mine was XC.
Our T-shirt slogan was "A Serious Case of the Runs."
My main problem comes from the pretending to be injured after the dive. If you are trying to draw a foul that's fine and part of the game, but the writhing on the ground gets very annoying and really interrupts the flow of the game.
It actually isn't that common for players to writhe on the ground in agony. Unfortunately, that's an accepted part of soccer culture so you do occasionally see some professional floppers doing their thing on the biggest stages of the game. That is a problem in some cases, but overall injury fakes are less of an issue than, say, making free throws. Most of the time, the player is grimacing in pain to a) gain the favor of the refs and b) to take a break from constantly running up and down a playing field. There isn't a break in the action except for halftime or unless the ball goes out of bounds or a penalty is called. A soccer pitch is significantly larger than an American football field and there's a lot of room for 11 players to cover for each team. Ball security and good passing, similar to hockey, are keys to victory. Another key is having a good striker who can weave through the opponent's defense and score clutch goals.
I realize this is a little more than your original post talked about but I felt like sharing some of the things I notice about the game.
Takes away from the hockey stuff I was talking about before, but whatever.
My freshman year of high school I kinda pulled a Denard on one team in the first game. The second game of the series comes along, after the opening drop I come across the blue line with the puck and take an elbow straight to the head, with no play on the puck. I drop like a sack of bricks initially and then jump up to get the puck back. Whistle blows for the penalty and I come off the ice for our second penalty kill line. My coach gets in my face and tells me to never get up that quickly after a hit like that while I'm on his team.
Sure enough, next time I skate across the blue line with the puck, same thing happens and I lay on the ice motionless. Kid got thrown out.
I guess the point is just to say that milking something might be effective, but the diving kills the flow of a game. Especially in a sport like soccer where the clock runs.
That's why there are penalty minutes added to the ends of halves of play. The refs come up with an arbitrary number of minutes designed to replace the time that was lost re-setting the ball and calling penalties. Sometimes the refs wait a little longer if one team is pressing a major advantage.
The story about staying down on the ice to get the whistle makes sense to me. I almost cringe when a Michigan basketball player gets up too quickly after getting charged in the post. It's important to dramatically topple over like a stack of bricks to maximize the chance of a whistle on the other team.
Well obviously you and I disagree about soccer, just like we did about zoning laws (BTW if you check out a conversation I had in the NCAA Death Penalty thread, there's a lot of great writing on zoning and just about any other issue from the place me and a few others got to talking about, in case you're ever bored and wonder what three or four people on here believe). No reason to ruin a good time.
Not saying I think soccer is for she-men who can't play hockey or anything like that; just saying that I think it needs some rule changes before it will be easy for me to watch. However, the USA calling for soccer rule changes won't accomplish anything. It'd be like having 15 Republicans/Democrats in the House...the support for a proposal just wouldn't be there.
Someday you and I will watch the USA in the World Cup and we'll be cheering our heads off at the TV. I'll help you understand, and love, the game more.
The zoning talk was quite helpful. I was able to parse my other urban planning friend's arguments better when we were arguing about Prop 5 in Ohio (the union-busting bill)...but that's a polemic for another thread :-)
In time, that money will come. Today's youth is moving towards soccer/football/hockey, but today's season ticket purchaser still grew up with baseball and is more likely to attend/watch baseball. As time goes on, we're going to see more people move towards other sports and away from baseball, mostly as a result of the aging of the soccer generation, in addition to population growth in the latino communities.
I hope the MLS will eventually reach the level of a top european league, but I don't see it. However, it should be able to reach the level of some of the eastern european leagues if money continues to pump in.
Like you said, the MLS will never be on the same level with the topflight EPL, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1 or Bundesliga teams. The future looks bright to impove the MLS with all of the academys that are being supported by the MLS teams.
We're not a soccer country and I don't think that we ever will be. Everytime something happens and the press proclaims, "Soccer has arrived" it fizzles.
Baseball has caused its own problems. Personally I cannot stand to watch MLB on TV, but I find the College World Series absolutely captivating.
Right now, football is king and the other TV sports are just there to take up time until football season begins again. Even in college, how much coverage does UM baseball get on this site outside of FA's posts?
that causes a reasonable number of American players to go overseas in search of better pay and competition, and not the other way around. (Cricket doesn't count.)
while it might be cheap to play, it's relatively tough to play a pickup game becausey you need a lot of people and a lot of space. with a game like basketball, if you have a hoop and a ball at least you can shoot around. two guys can play one on one. four can play an actual game.
The problems with its marketability also stem from the ability of star players to have the opportunity to make plays. In basketball, soccer, hockey, and football, you can gear an offense toward your best players. In baseball, your best hitter usually gets 3 to 5 chances to make a difference in a 3 hour span. I think that's a definite flaw in the game.
I've never really been a fan of baseball, and I've always been bothered by the whole "America's Pasttime" mystique surrounding it. It seems like they are grasping at straws and yelling "God is on our side" in order to convince people to watch. In my opinion, it is a slow, tedious game to watch, and playing isn't much better. Standing in the outfield and waiting for something to maybe come your way isn't exactly exciting. I think its time has past, and it will continue to be marginalized.
Of the team sports, baseball is second only to hockey in terms of expense. Gloves are around $100 for an entry level and everyone needs one, bats $30 or so for a cheap-o model, balls at about $10 per. Of course, the glove and bat are very occasional costs, but still, compared to soccer where you need one ball for 20ish players, or basketball, or even pickup football, it's pretty pricey.
Baseball's popularity has been further eroded away by the double edged that is steroids. Fans loved to see the increase in home runs and runs scored, but did not like how those runs were being produced artificially. On top of that, the scandal has been continually drug out over and over again with the federal investigation and the Bonds trial, people get very tired of only hearing about this one issue.
I see that for sure. I care less and less about baseball every year. I don't sit around reading off-season articles, I don't care who they trade and pick up, and I certainly can't watch a game where my team isn't playing. Its just not exciting, and I will never be convinced that it can be.
but I think it's the hardest sport to watch if I'm not watching my team. I'm not just going to watch any ol' game for fun
only sport i can't watch on TV is golf.
would rather watch the finish of close game of golf than any baseball game.....and I don't really like golf.
I've heard attending a golf tournament is a blast, i just don't can't watch it on TV. The announcers are so...quiet. It's like a Braves broadcast. Puts me right to sleep. I can't say I agree, though. I'm pretty passionate about baseball. It's the sport I know best, I suppose.