For the better part of October, I pounded on baseball. Hard.
It’s not that I don’t love the game. I do. I just hate the way it is being played now.
Really, it would seem to be an easy fix for baseball: Enforce rules that require batters to stay in the box and demand that pitchers work faster. Simply pick up the pace.
If they played quickly in big games in Babe Ruth’s era, Mickey Mantle’s era, Reggie Jackson’s era, why can’t it be that way in Miguel Cabrera’s era?
I thought I would leave some parting shots from others to show I am hardly alone in this crusade.
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Michael Glicken of Sports Media Monitor was intrigued by my rants about the length of games. Far more proficient in math than me, he took an analytical approach in evaluating the pace of play.
Glicken writes:
Our goal was not to explain every inefficiency that drives games longer (why game six in 1918 only took an hour and 46 minutes for example), it was to determine whether the present postseason games ran longer than “normal,” and get closer to the root causes.
Glicken offers a detailed analysis. Definitely an interesting read.
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Matthew Futterman of the Wall Street Journal did a piece on why kids aren’t watching baseball. I’ve made that observation from my own teenage boys, who only had a passing interest in the World Series. They were much more into college and pro football and the beginning of the NBA season.
Writes Futterman:
The average World Series viewer this year is 54.4 years old, according to Nielsen, the media research firm. The trend line is heading north: The average age was 49.9 in 2009. Kids age 6 to 17 represented just 4.3% of the average audience for the American and National League Championship Series this year, compared with 7.4% a decade ago.
Comparisons with the NFL are pointless. That behemoth of North American sports dominates nearly every demographic. But kids make up a larger segment of the television audiences for the NBA, NHL and even soccer’s English Premier League than they do for baseball.
Kids accounted for 9.4% of the NBA conference finals audience this year, compared with 10.6% a decade ago. They represented 9% of the NHL conference-finals audience in the spring. For Premier League soccer on the NBC Sports Network, kids are accounting for 11% of the audience.
Futterman then writes:
As riveting as the sport can be at its most intense moments, baseball’s primary activities are the pitcher staring at the catcher to decide what to throw and the batter stepping in and out of the batter’s box. It doesn’t have to be that way.
May we suggest two simple rule changes: Once batters step into the box, they shouldn’t be allowed to step out. Otherwise it’s a strike. If no one is on base, pitchers get seven seconds to throw the next pitch. Otherwise it’s a ball.
Wow, what a novel concept.
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Michael Bradley of the National Sports Journalism Center also harped on the time issue.
Baseball can, however, do something about two things that hurt it. First, the sport has become long and, frankly, boring. No matter how much Fox tries to play up the drama that accompanies every pitch of a Series game, there can be no denying the horribly tedious pace of just about every baseball game played. Come October, the tortoise becomes a slug. Game three of the 2013 Series, a 5-4 nine-inning affair, lasted 3:54. That’s absolutely uncalled for. It’s one thing to let a three-hour game wash over you on a balmy summer evening and quite another to endure hours of standing around when the alarm clock is ready to pounce at 6 a.m.
Bradley, though, adds baseball needs to do a better job of marketing its stars.
The magic of baseball doesn’t fire fans’ interests any longer. There has to be more. The NBA doesn’t sell the pick-and-roll or the three-point shot. It sells the people who make those things come to life. And it does that throughout the whole season and then during its draft and free agency. By the time the Finals come around, fans can’t wait to see these heroes on the biggest stage. And just about every team capable of reaching the Finals has stars with whom fans are quite familiar. Baseball does a terrible job with this. As the 2013 playoffs dawned, few fans outside of Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Oakland knew about those team’s top players, and that was 30% of the field. If baseball wants its World Series to be more popular, it must create a culture of stars, the better to rope in casual viewers.
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Joe Lucia of Awful Announcing also picks up on the marketing theme.
That’s why baseball is struggling among kids. It’s not the pace of the game, the length of the game, or the late start times – it’s all about marketing. Joey Votto is one of the best players in baseball, but when was the last time you saw him in a commercial? Chris Sale is the best player in the city of Chicago, one of the largest media markets in the country – but could a non-White Sox fan even pick him out of a lineup? If Andrew McCutchen shaved his head, could he walk into any convenience store in Pittsburgh and buy a candy bar?
Agree, Joe, but it also is pace of the game too. Combination of both.
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Anyway, I wanted to get in a few last shots. I’ll give it a rest for a while, but you can be sure I’ll be firing away again next October.
I’m disappointed in this report. I was looking fwd to engaging a 3hr54min intense read! LOL, kidding. This is an appropriate article and should lead the charge of continued discussions regarding baseball’s bore.
I don’t get Lucia’s marketing point. You need viewers to market to. NBA fans know NBA players because the watch the product and that’s where many of the ads are shown. I’d hardly throw the NBA up as your poster child for league success though…could find several articles that talk about the slow death of the NBA too. I think the simplest explanation continues to be correct…baseball is boring at three hours and the next generation of fans are doing other things, whether watching other sports or playing video games. Our entertainment options are more limitless today than in the last but baseball just isn’t fighting for their piece of the marketshare. Sad.
I absolutely think Michael Bradley’s comment on marketing players was spot on.
This is what happens when MLB allows the philosophy of ESPN and Fox (i.e. All Red Sox…all Yankees…all the time…) to go unchecked.
When a team west of the Allegheny Mountains has a terrific season (think the 2005 White Sox to use one example) nobody knows about them, casual fans don’t care. MLB is just as guilty as those networks because they allow this to happen,
The 05 World series had just about everything you could want in a Series. A walk off game winner, the longest game in World Series history and a 1-0 clincher…yet ‘fans’ like Keith Olbermann had the audacity to say it was a bad series, to make snide comments about it basically because it was just the White Sox and Houston. Heaven forbid the Yankees weren’t in it!!!!!
And MLB instead of defending that series and many others like it not involving New York or Boston clubs sat by and said nothing.
You reap what you sow MLB.
Frankly, I think baseball is pulling out all the stops when it comes to marketing. You can market tail off, but if there is no initial interest in the game, your chance of getting anyone to recognize Joey Votto because of marketing is a moot point. The game is too slow–period. This is the day and age of 146 characters, 8 second sound bites, etc. Speed it up and those marketing ideas might catch on.
Sorry Ed, but this is the way post-season baseball is played and watched in 2013. Ridiculously long games viewed only by people who can actually remember seeing Harmon Killebrew and Ernie Banks play the game live (i.e.-GEEZERS LIKE ME!).
Eventually, the beaseball ecomonic bubble will burst (or at least “stagnate”), but for right now, the networks will continue to pay ever increasing rights’ fees for ever decreasing audiences. So ’til then, expect those commercial breaks every half-inning to somehow get even longer…
Happy viewing in 2014!
Banning batting gloves should speed up the game enough.
Bruce, that awful, annoying Dane Cook/“There’s Only One October” campaign is still ringing in my ears 5 years later. Is this what you mean by pulling out all the stops? That and “Spiderman 2” ads plastered on bases?
Or Opening Day in Japan? Or an exhibition game determining World Series home-field advantage? Or World Series games in freakin’ November? Or ending games way past kids’ bedtimes? Or ending single-admission double headers? Or an AVERAGE of $210 for a family of 4 to see a regular-season game? Or by ignoring the slow pace of the game for years? Or by having Bud Selig himself boycott Barry Bonds’ record-breaking achievements? Or by having African-American players and fans leave the sport in droves?
Selig has done everything but award an Edsel to the World Series MVP and force people to drink New Coke at the ballparks. And you call that marketing their tails off???
Michael Jordan was a womanizer, a degenerate gambler, and pretty much a world-class a-hole — yet the NBA cashed him in for gold. So what the heck is baseball’s problem?
The most recognizable faces in baseball right now are Bud Selig & Alex Rodriguez. There’s the problem.
I find that line of commentary a little hilarious. When I hear the NBA people talk about the marketing of their league, they’re complaining about why the network markets the players and not the teams, and here we’re complaining that they market the teams and not the players.
In both cases, ESPN is just marketing what the audience already wants. One’s a sport where a guy can go out and average 30pts a game, and another is a sport where a .300 batting average makes you a superstar, it’s pretty clear why there would be a difference in marketing.