Minding Baseball’s Business
A couple weeks ago, Maury Brown at Biz Of Baseball posted “a mosaic” he’d put together — “a multi-faceted, exceptionally broad view of Major League Baseball in 2008.”The site asked various figures who follow the game professionally, from bloggers to team personnel to marketing folk, to talk about the state of the game right now, and you can read the results here.
It’s an ambitious project and quite instructive about how people think about the game: the differences between what a team president focuses on and what the fans focus on, for instance, but also the similarities.A few points bore further discussion (or, in some cases, bore returning to a familiar discussion).
Kurt Badenhausen, Senior Editor, Forbes: “Who are baseball’s marketing stars? The game has a plethora of young stars on the field, but they are not stars on a national level where companies want to align with them. Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning and LeBron James are all part of multiple national ad campaigns. Why aren’t companies interested in baseball’s best? Dice-K, Ichiro and Hideki Matsui all pull in big endorsement money in Japan, but Forbes research shows Derek Jeter to be the only American born baseball player that earns more than $3 million a year from endorsements.”
I don’t know the answer to that.It’s interesting that, in that razor commercial purporting to feature the best of the best — Tiger, Roger Federer, and a soccer player whose name is escaping me at the moment, as every soccer player’s except Becks’s and Pele’s tends to do — the marketing division couldn’t produce an NFL player or a guy like Alex Rodriguez.
We can’t blame it on lack of acting ability, either, because the guy Badenhausen points to as earning the biggest endorsement money in the MLB is a dreadful actor.I love Jetes, but he’s done the Ford campaigns for years now and his line readings haven’t improved a whit.(The actors in the current spot, where Jeter is “undercover” as a car salesman, won’t put anyone in the Royal Shakespeare Company out of a job either, but I’ve said to friends several times that I suspect the robotic “are you sure you’re not a shortstop” kid got hired to make Jeter look better.)But it’s not about that for the sales team of Gillette or Mennen or whoever; it’s not about whether you actually believe Michael Strahan ate Chunky Soup in the locker room.It’s that you still remember Strahan and Strahan’s mom did those commercials.
It’s probably unfair to compare the Japanese endorsement environment to the American one; Japan’s reverence for its baseball greats, the Charles Lindbergh levels of attention and fame trained on guys like Matsui, whose face appeared on 747s, doesn’t have an analog in the States.Still, Badenhausen is right; you just don’t see baseball players in ads for anything unless you’re watching a baseball game, and even then, at least in the New York market, it’s not a current player — it’s Yogi Berra.Twenty years ago, I feel like you saw Ken Griffey Jr. in commercials during every kind of show; Nike facetiously ran him for president in ’96.What happened?I mean, I know what happened to Griffey; his move to Cincinnati led to some hard feelings, and then he started to get hurt, badly, all the time.But what happened to the excitement that surrounded him and McGwire and guys like that back then?What happened to the feeling that, because of the endorsements, the whole culture knew these guys and felt like they belonged to us?
Well, a lot of things happened.A strike happened, and a lot of fans didn’t want to see baseball players droning on about close shaves for a paycheck after that.And then the pendulum might have swung back, but…steroids.It’s hard to find a guy famous enough to sell athlete’s foot powder to the whole country who’s also completely untouched by any hint of involvement in performance-enhancing drugs; Jeter is possibly the only one whom the ad teams perceive as clean-cut enough.A-Rod is a first-ballot Hall of Famer, but I wouldn’t sign him for stuff like that either, because the nickname “Pay-Rod” tells you everything you need to know about what the TV-watching public is going to think when they see him hawking cereal, to wit: “That guy doesn’t have enough money?”
I think we’ll see more MLB guys doing nationwide campaigns in the future, once PEs get a little further back in the rearview (if in fact they do).But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that baseball players are considered radioactive right now.
John Brattain, columnist for, among others, The Hardball Times: “What has to be borne in mind is that absent the financial windfalls that come from revenue generating mallparks catering to the economic royals of society (with minimal out-of-pocket expenses to cartel members) the game’s revenues would be nowhere near as high as they are right now.”
Love the term “mallparks,” although Brattain’s piece overall felt rushed and ranty.I’ll get into his main issue in a second.
Maury Brown, Founder/President, Business of Sports Network: “Let’s hope the commoners won’t all be relegated to the upper deck and bleachers in the future. While it is a supply and demand world, the lower bowl will soon be nothing more than corporately purchased blocks of seats due to rapidly escalating pricing. And, as we all have seen, nothing is better for television than empty seats behind the plate that don’t get used that day by the suits.”
The price of a day at the ballpark is ridiculously high, but you can’t necessarily argue with what the market will bear.Rich people get better seats; this is the way of the world.The problem I have is that it isn’t rich people; it’s corporations and law firms who buy up the field-level boxes, and often the seats don’t get used.The nosebleed seats have their own distinctive charms, not least the salty commentary that never fails to open new frontiers in comic timing, but sitting at altitude at the ballpark is like flying first class: a completely different experience that simply isn’t on the menu for most people.
I don’t know how to go about addressing that disparity.Perhaps the teams could track which luxury boxes go the most egregiously unused, disinvite the owner from renewing for next season, and return those seats to the market at a lower price temporarily.The issue isn’t so much that the field-level seats cost so much; it’s that they sit empty while people who would really appreciate them sit in the upper deck.
Craig Calcaterra, author, Shysterball: “I’ve been watching a lot of 1970s and 1980s games on tape recently, and I am shocked at how bad the time in between pitches has gotten compared to where it was a mere 20 years ago. The umpires need to enforce Rule 8.04 and something needs to be done to cut down on batter baloney (i.e. adjusting gloves, hats, cups, etc.). Let’s just play some ball already.”
This is a complaint you hear quite frequently in the last few years; tellingly, it’s usually the announcers grumbling about it, although Bill James and others have expressed frustration at the amount of dead time in baseball.A quick Google/Wiki didn’t give me any hard stats on the average length of a ballgame today versus twenty years ago, so if any of y’all would like to supply some, feel free, but a garden-variety midseason game doesn’t feel much longer to me than it did back in the day.
Even if the average game is a few minutes longer, I fail to see a problem.I like a long game; it means more baseball.And it’s…a few minutes.It’s not like games used to get played in 45 minutes and now a three-hour slugfest is screwing up Michael Kay’s per-hour rate.And regardless of how you feel about proposed rule changes/enforcements that would cut down on the OCD pitchouts, cup adjustments, and so on, the source of most delays isn’t on the field.It’s in the control room.TV insists on a certain number of commercial breaks, or on cramming an ad into a pitching change, which the players then have to stand around and wait out.The “players fidget more than they did in the ’80s and the umps need to start calling it” argument is, in my view, overblown.Tell the networks to chop the ad space down to 90 seconds.
…Yeah, that won’t happen, because that’s where the money is made, but don’t put it on the umpires, because you can shave 20-30 minutes off a game by tightening up the ad space, or you can pretend it’s about on-field behavior and shave off maybe three minutes.
Baseball is a pastoral game.It isn’t played with a clock.It has periods of inactivity built into it, in no small part because the defense controls the ball.There is a breed of baseball purist who never wants anything about the game to change, who longs for the untainted dead-ball era where guys played in seventy-pound flannels and handlebar mustaches, drunk, with six broken fingers; that isn’t me.I think the proposed deployment of instant replay is a good thing, because the fact that we all still know who Don Denkinger is is not a good thing and why not prevent that from happening again.But there’s a difference between updating the game to include relevant technology or reversing imbalances that don’t benefit anyone, and “correcting” the game’s basic nature.This is just what baseball is, that there’s always a reliever known as The Human Rain Delay, that you’ll get fifteen throws to first base in the eighth inning of a tie game, and if you’re so overscheduled in your life that you need seven or eight minutes trimmed off during play, baseball is not your biggest problem.
But given that Calcaterra and I disagree on this point, his next argument, which I do agree strongly with, is somewhat puzzling.
“Finally, baseball has to be reminded to trust its product. I went to a game at PETCO Park last year and was shocked at how much singing, dancing, clowning, and general farting around goes on between innings. Giant dancing Muppets and pep squads and t-shirt cannons and the like may have a place somewhere in polite society, but a baseball park is not one of them.”
Amen.It’s not just the majors, either (although one of the few benefits of the Yankee organization’s extravagant self-seriousness is that you see slightly less of that nonsense in the Bronx, because it’s considered undignified).The Cyclones, the Bears — there is constant noise, motion, entertainment on Diamondvision and activity on the field.It presumes a complete inability on the part of the attendees to sit still for two minutes while the teams switch sides, a pitcher warms up, or the ground crew does some housekeeping.Can’t we just converse amongst ourselves?It’s two minutes.
And this is what baseball is.When you pitch every single aspect of the game-going experience to the new/casual/first-time ticket-holder, if your goal is to woo them away from whatever other, allegedly more razzle-dazzle, sport you assume they like better than baseball, you look desperate, and you annoy people who came to watch a baseball game and don’t need all that hurrah to enjoy themselves.A couple of bat races, okay.Playing music between every pitch to goose the crowd, in case they don’t know they should pay attention?It’s just too much.”AREN’T YOU HAVING A GOOD TIME, FANS?!”We’d have a better time if you didn’t water the $8 beer.Failing that, shut the fuck up for five minutes so I can concentrate on my scorecard.
David Chalk, online contributor to various: “There’s also obviously something wrong with the game when the 2007 NLCS between the Rockies and Diamondbacks had a lower rating than the 12-year-olds competing in the Little League World Series. Marketing could be better, but the dearth of talent and personalities on those two teams was also a problem.”
Wow.What?Chalk is a Tampa Bay Rays beat guy, so he should probably know better than to generalize like that.In any case: no, dude.The Rockies and D-backs play in relatively small markets, and they’re expansion teams that may not have the fan-base depth of the Cubs or even the Astros.Not everyone cares about the postseason once their teams get bounced, and not everyone in Denver has learned to care about the Rockies yet.
And…come on.Dearth of talent?With Arizona’s pitching?You’re not serious.You think the kids don’t know who Tulo is?You think the kids don’t know who Eric Byrnes is?Those guys can play; they don’t need “personality.”That is their “personality” — being awesome at playing baseball.Milton Bradley has a ton of personality; the ability to tell a joke is not pertinent here.When these teams have a couple more decades behind them, have built up strong rooters around the country, have established bitter rivalries that go back a generation, then a Colorado-Arizona postseason series will get better ratings.
Or maybe it won’t, because everyone has seventillion channels and the internet now, or would rather play Guitar Hero, or whatever the hell.You have like a dozen variables that could explain why the series got low ratings, but no, Chalk goes straight to “there’s something wrong with the game.”Ain’t nothing wrong with the game, hoss.
“Baseball also seems to lose some of its unique character when an 83-win team like the ’06 Cardinals can be called world champions.”
How is that statement fucking asinine?Let me count the ways.First of all, a wild-card team winning the World Series doesn’t make baseball indistinguishable from tennis.It means that, sometimes, you get a different result in a seven-game series than you do in a 162-game season.This is a little something I like to call THE NATURE OF POSTSEASON PLAY.Why bother even having a World Series if you think nobody can live with the harsh mistress of small sample sizes? Just crown the team with the most wins the World Champs and call it a day!
I sat beside a Mets fan during the ’06 postseason, so believe me, I understand that “World Champion St. Louis Cardinals” is not a phrase everyone fell in love with, but come on.It put a World Series ring on the finger of Albert Pujols.This is not a justice-free outcome.
Also: the 2004 Red Sox, a wild-card team, swept the Cards that year.The Cards that year won 105 games; the Sox won 90-odd.Does that mean the Sox shouldn’t have won?Would you presume to suggest that that victory, so many years and tears in the making, drained baseball of “some of its unique character”?That was about nothing but baseball’s unique character, and it’s pretty much the same situation.
I will assume that Chalk had to turn in his responses on a short deadline and didn’t think his statements through to their logical conclusions, but it doesn’t get any better from here.
“I’d love to see a return to 7 and 8 team divisions to try to cut down on weak divisional races.”
Again: henh?Yes, by all means, let’s go back to the forties and fifties, when seven- and eight-team divisions…got dominated by the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants every single year.Great solution.The New York clubs put fantastic teams on the field, too, and the arrangement of the divisions wouldn’t have helped the Browns win the pennant — besides which, we’ve had six different World Champs in the last seven years, right?So who cares if you have some weak divisions?Doesn’t that mean you conversely have a few strong divisions, where the races are real nail-biters?Isn’t that what you want — excitement down the stretch?Or would you rather make everything “fair” all the time?
I mean, according to this morning’s standings, the NL East is kind of shitting the bed right now.That doesn’t mean nobody cares what goes on there; it’s a pretty interesting season story so far, with the Mets flailing and Philly on fire and the Nats’ hot start and subsequent swoon.Every team in that division has a good narrative.What is the definition of “weak,” here?Does he mean “boring”?Because watching crappy teams isn’t boring.It’s maddening, it’s sometimes funny, but it isn’t boring if you like baseball.
“Another return to tradition was suggested by Cork Gaines of RaysIndex.com, who proposed adding a second wild card to each league, and for the non-division winners to face off in one-game playoffs. That would be exciting and give more meaning to the division races and regular season.”
“Exciting”?”Time-consuming,” yes, and “a goddamn nightmare to plan.”I don’t see how it gives more meaning to anything, because what happens after these playoffs?The non-division winners face off, and then — what?The winner gets a stuffed animal?How exactly would this function?I don’t love wild-card play either, to tell you the truth, but with this number of teams in the league, you have to do it that way.
“Perhaps most importantly, while Major League Baseball takes many opportunities to celebrate its civil rights legacy, it continues to fail to live up to that legacy in many ways.”
This is no doubt true.
“The way Barry Bonds has been treated by the commissioner, by the Giants, and by the Hall of Fame is a continuing disgrace — and one that has surely alienated many fans, particularly in the African-American community. The possible collusion to keep Bonds out of the game has cheated fans everywhere, and seems especially ridiculous when amnesty was given to everyone named in the Mitchell Report.”
I’ve already dealt with these arguments elsewhere, so I won’t repeat myself.A few reminders, however: Bonds broke a record held sacred by many; it seems evident that he did so with the help of performance-enhancing drugs; he is currently under indictment for his alleged involvement with those drugs, and for lying about possessing them, which makes him a tough sell for many GMs.
The man can still hit.An AL team looking to add just a run or two per game to get into serious contention could consider him worth it.But you do not just hire Bonds’s bat, is the thing, and the other thing is that Bonds brought a lot of this treatment on himself.
“Gary Sheffield’s allegations of unequal treatment of black players were not acted upon, despite being confirmed by Kenny Lofton and others.”
See once again my previous comments on this.Torre plays favorites; the fact that he brought Felix goddamn Heredia in again and again in the face of all reason would seem to indicate that it is not race, but rather stubborn attachment to bullpen-use theories that don’t work, or perhaps the smoking of crack, that is the key factor in his decision-making.Sheffield and Lofton were both replaced by players of color.That doesn’t categorically exclude race as a factor; I’m absolutely not dismissing allegations of racism categorically, and I’m sure these two men specifically have had to confront it, but it’s probably unproductive to frame the issue using Sheffield and Bonds, because of all the other variables in the equation for both of them.
Jonah Keri, of ESPN.com and elsewhere, on what’s wrong with the game today, among other things: “Marvin Miller and Bill James still waiting for a Hall of Fame call. Patriotism forced down our throats during the 7th-inning stretch. Saturday afternoon out-of-market games blacked out by FOX.”
Agreed on all counts.You can hear outright grumbling during the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium now, because obviously nobody in the stands has forgotten 9/11 or the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, but it’s time to go back to “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.”Kate Smith is hereby thanked for her yeoman service, and dismissed.
And FOX needs to choose their Saturday-afternoon game and stand behind it nationwide.Thinking fans understand that Sox-Sox is a hot match-up, and we know how to work the remote if we’d rather watch the Mets.
Todd Radom, Todd Radom Design (did the logos for, among others, the Cyclones and the Nats): “I am far from the first observer to point out the fact that he grinding length of many games is leaving the youth of America behind. As a Red Sox fan, I’m a guy who is used to sitting through three and a half hour games replete with upwards of 400 pitches, but it’s the next generation, my kids, that I fear will lose interest if we continue to plod along at this pace.”
Oh my sweet purple God, baseball is not now and has never been designed to hold your attention, rigid and unswerving, for three hours.Neither is any other sport.Kids can pick up and put down a game from inning to inning, just like adults, because if they like the game then they understand that this is how it behaves.Can we please stop acting like every other sport is begun and completed in the time it takes to pinch a loaf at work?Have you watched the NFL lately?We are not talking about actually running an actual marathon, or attending Nicholas Nickleby.It is not a physical hardship.Sporting events take time, which is why we call them “events” and not, say, “snacks,” so maybe if everyone could STOP FUCKING COMPLAINING ABOUT THE FUCKING LENGTH OF THE FUCKING GAMES.
I do agree that the dearth of day games is problematic for youth interest, but back when most games were played during the day, do you think the younguns could enjoy postseason play?How many ’50s classrooms do you think had a TV tuned to the Classic?None.Someone had to smuggle in a transistor, and that someone inevitably got detention, especially if that someone was named “Bunting.”
A kid who wants to get into baseball will find a way.A kid who doesn’t give a shit is not going to buy in because the game is two hours and thirty minutes instead of two hours and fifty-two minutes.Most kids want the games to go on longer so they can leverage seeing the end into staying up later.My own parents stomped into my room at midnight a number of times to bitch at me for not going to sleep, but if I could point to the radio and shrug, “Mets are at Candlestick,” I was off the hook.
Playing baseball is not part of the fabric of a kid’s life the way it was back in the day when you saw a stickball game on every block in Brooklyn and children rambled around their towns unsupervised until dinnertime all summer.Youth baseball is more regimented now; children’s time is more regimented now.We didn’t wear helmets to ride our bikes.We didn’t have cell phones.During daylight hours in July, my mother didn’t necessarily know where I was half the time, and we were both fine with that.It’s a different world from 25 years ago, or 75 years ago.Kids don’t play baseball casually anymore, don’t put cards in their bike spokes as much, don’t daydream about playing shortstop for the Yankees the way they used to do, because it’s less a part of their daily warm-weather lives, and as a result, it’s less personal.That’s why kids don’t get into it, if they don’t.Or maybe their parents don’t care about it; God knows I wouldn’t have cared if I didn’t have baseball fans for parents.
This isn’t baseball’s fault.This is the times we live in.This is individual tastes and cultural shifts.Baseball isn’t the all-things-to-all-people national pastime it once was.It doesn’t mean we have to turn it into something it isn’t to satisfy a standard that’s irrelevant to it.
Joe Seigler, Ranger Fans: “A lot is made of the fact that it’s a game meant for kids, but so many ancillary things around the game are things we have to ‘explain’ to kids is a major hassle.”
Then perhaps parenting is not something you want to do.There’s a lot of shit in life you have to “explain” to kids that you wouldn’t have to in a perfect world.We live in this world.Stadiums should be named for people or teams, not companies, but that’s just how it is.Not every TV game break should have a proprietary sponsorship, but it does, that’s just how it is.I wouldn’t want to explain steroids, or the Mitchell Report, or what Ozzie Guillen’s latest malfunction is to a child, or for that matter the Spears family or the Bush family or why a guy can’t marry another guy, but at the end of the day, if you have a kid, they have questions, you have to come up with answers, and that’s just how it is.The idea that any professional sport is “for kids” in this day and age, that baseball has some responsibility to remain quaintly babyish…I don’t get that.I don’t mean that professional sports are reserved for grownups exclusively or rated PG-13, but if what you want from baseball is for it to provide a sanitized safe space for your children, well, that’s not on baseball to do.Yes, it’s a game, but so is Russian roulette; let’s not be willfully naïve.
There’s nothing wrong with baseball that accepting baseball on its own frequently frustrating terms wouldn’t go a long way towards solving.
Tags: Bill James Hideki Matsui Poo-Holes sites
Great post, Sars. And BTW, that soccer player’s name is Thierry Henry.
Thierry Henry from Arsenal of the English Premier League.
Amen and amen.
Coupla thoughts: it seems to me that games this year are indeed shorter than they were last year. At least on YES. Between-inning breaks are much shorter, or my taking a pee break is longer than it used to be. Further, many more games finish within the 3-hour schedule block, but that may have to do with anemic offense borne of a newly-found lack of clubhouse greenies. Or clubhouse ice cream. Or both.
I’m with you on the ADD-inspired ballpark stuff and nonsense. Shut up and let me people-watch, stadium folk!
Oh: Thierry Henry is the soccer dude. And it was McNabb whose mom hawked soup, not Strahan. Strahan killed a squirrel with armpit odor.
This (that you’ve written) is all long and thoughtful and I feel bad, but I was mostly thinking: I would totally buy stuff peddled by Ryan Howard. He seems really fun! Also, having seen two hilarious local commercials starring Bronson Arroyo, ditto there.
And word on the Marvin Miller lament.
I think Cal is about the last of the clean baseball spokespeople. Even now, how many years after he’s broken every record and retired, I bet he could go national and shill something with a good recognition rate (WAY better than that soccer player you mention). He’s just too busy with little leagues in north-eastern MD.
My husband’s from NC, so he’s not exactly from a baseball family and just doesn’t get it when I say that the yard in the house we buy has to be big enough to play ball. He’s worried about where the Koi pond will go. I’m worried about home plate placement such that the kids (and me) can avoid breaking windows as much as possible while also minimizing the hopping of fences to retrieve lost balls.
I think basebal will always have a place as long as there are people who love it and pass that love on to the next generation. It doesn’t appeal to everyone and that’s ok. My favorite part of the game is the fellowship with the folks I’m there with (and the random people sitting around us), and the stupid traditions we come up with over the years (mine mostly revolve around what foods I _have_ to buy at Camden Yards). I love how, even with all the changes, deep down it’s still the same. I can go to our local AA park watching players I’ve never heard of before and probably never will again and still have a great time.
“You think the kids don’t know who Tulo is?”
Thank you for this. Because they damned sure do. We are aware of the Rockies current dismal record. We love them anyway, just like we’ve always loved the Broncos. And I agree with you; Denver is a football town, and not everyone has learned to love the Rockies yet. But they will.
As for the Diamondbacks? Meh. :)
As a formerly rabid fan, I can only say baseball is losing me. I have the entire roster of the ’73 Reds memorized but can’t tell you who their starting outfield is today.
I don’t know if it is the dearth of televised games, the insanely long playoffs, the constant “Boston-New York” story line (because I gather that no other teams play), the lack of afternoon doubleheaders, the DH… I can’t point to a single thing that is keeping me from the game. Strange though that, just when the NFL is moving to make the first game a major calendar event, baseball’s marketing execs are trying to repackage the tradition.
I haven’t watched a single game through this season, and instead of taking my usual day off for Opening Day, I used it the next Friday to watch Tiger Woods at Augusta.
Not to side-step the main point of the article, but in this survey of 30 baseball people there’s not even one woman represented? C’mon, there must be at least one female exec or blogger out there that they could have interviewed. For the next installment, I nominate Sars!
I’m 100% with Sars on what slows these games down: the control room.
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No, they should not. But as my names suggest, I am highly prejudicial against them and I am always happy when the Red Sox are miserable.
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Please someone make this happen. The first year that they started it playing it, I felt like a proud American. The next two years, I was respectfully understood.
But. Come. On. It has been 7 years. Can they play another song. Or another version of the song. Hell, I would even take America the Beautiful. Kate Smith’s is played every game and the more that I hear it at each game, the more I think the stadium is playing an old scratchy record that will break down any minute if they play that song again. If only.
Hope this helps: From USAToday, 3/6/2003: “The goal is to cut seven minutes from the average time of a nine-inning game, to 2:45. Games lasted 2:52 in 2002. (As recently as 1983, the Elias Sports Bureau reported games averaged 2:36, while games 60 years ago took an incredible 1:58 to complete, according to The Sporting News.) Last fall’s postseason games averaged 3:25.” From the Boston Globe, 6/8/2008: “The average time of game as of May 22 was 2:51, but it’s 2:49 since May 23. What’s interesting is that time of game had increased from 2006 and 2007 from 2:47 to 2:51 at the start of this season.”
More interesting stats in that latter article (link broken for formatting):
http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/articles/
2008/06/08/mlb_works_on_its_fast_ball/
As a Red Sox fan, where we’ve had maybe three games total under three hours this year (IIRC), I wouldn’t mind slightly shorter games. But that seems to be the penalty for being a large-market, high-payroll team. (Away games have longer commercial breaks, interestingly and annoyingly.) But yeah, there’s only so much I want done in-game about that.
And SO much word about the video game arcade experience at the ballpark these days. Atlanta was pretty bad for that, the time I went there, and the AAA Pawtucket Red Sox were insane. Yankee and Fenway were pretty sedate in comparison, but it was still overdone. If they’re not there to be entertained by the game itself, let ’em be bored!
Thanks for another awesome baseball column. I send my dad the links to them, and we usually end up having a good chat (via e-mail) about them – which is pretty much the only way we get to share baseball now, as I live on the other side of the world. So, again, thanks.
Also, your mention of stickball reminded me that there was a piece on the annual Bronx stickball tournie on NPR’s ‘Only a Game’ a few weeks ago. If you didn’t catch it, I’d highly recommend looking it up on their website.
Finally, to all those baseball fans who complain about the length of the game? Look into cricket, y’all. Five-day matches, complete with meal and tea breaks, and it can STILL end in a draw? That’s some bloody endurance, that is.
“Oh my sweet purple God…”
This, along with “plot grotto” (from an unrelated podcast), is going in my Favorite Things I Heard Today file.
PS maybe they could go back to “Born in the USA”, ha ha.
Guh, it is McNabb. The amount of shit that guy already puts up with and now he’s got me confusing him with Strahan.
Disclaimer: I’m only a casual fan of the game, so my husband could add a lot more to this than I could. But that’s never stopped me before. :)
It’s interesting that you have a picture of Griffey up near the discussion of baseball’s lack of “hero” figures (for lack of a better term). If you want a guy who plays the game well and doesn’t have a cloud of roids hanging over your head, he’s your guy. I grew up in the Cincy market, and folks down there love Junior. It’s a shame to see him get hurt all the freakin’ time; he’s a solid player when he’s healthy and appears to be just an all-around good guy.
And a comment on the Diamondbacks/Rockies series: I live in Phoenix now, and my husband and I went to some games last year before we had a kiddo to drag around, and we were both surprised at the attendance. In a city this big, you think more people could go to the games. Our theory is that the D-backs don’t have a large fan base because nobody’s from here. I don’t have to take off my shoes to count the number of people I’ve met in two years here who were born and raised in Arizona. The area is full of transplants from all over the country, and a lot of those people still keep their loyalties with their hometown teams and just…don’t seem to care about the D-backs.
As for the length of the game…that’s why God invented naps. That’s what Sunday afternoons in the summer are for–dozing off in front of a baseball game!
PS @michele, thanks for those figures.
Bill James pointed out in his essay on this that baseball did actually sort of have a clock back in the day: the sun. And if they started a doubleheader at 1 PM, they had to hustle to get both games in before sunset.
@JenK: Interesting theory; you may have a point. Almost everyone I know here who’s from another team’s market originally is loyal to that team (or doesn’t care about baseball anyway).
@JenK: I think your theory is right on for the Phoenix area. Because so many people are new to AZ, most of them are still loyal to their former home team. Plus, they often can see their old “home” team at spring training games in the Phoenix/Scottsdale area, or they go to see the ‘Snakes (as my dad insists on calling the Diamondbacks) only when their team is playing them.
@funtime42: I don’t have the ’73 Reds memorized, but I’m pretty solid on ’74 through ’76. I was born in Cincinnati, and the Big Red Machine was my hometown team when I was a child. I was very sad when we moved to Scottsdale Arizona in 1976. For many years after that, I followed the Reds as my “home” team, as Arizona didn’t get its own baseball team until well after I had left for college in California. I don’t follow the Reds any longer; once I left for Berkeley, I had the choice of the A’s or the Giants for my baseball needs.
As another recent transplant to Phoenix, and as a new fan of baseball, I agree with JenK. I went to a Cubs and a BoSox game in Arizona last year, and it feels like there are still more fans cheering for the away team. I think it will just take some more time to establish a true fan base for the Dbacks.
And, (not to be petty, since really, we don’t have a whole lot of bragging room, what at sitting at 1st place with a 41-41 record in the NL West), but watching crappy teams sure is fun as long at the crappy team in question is the Rockies! :)
“And a comment on the Diamondbacks/Rockies series: I live in Phoenix now, and my husband and I went to some games last year before we had a kiddo to drag around, and we were both surprised at the attendance. In a city this big, you think more people could go to the games. Our theory is that the D-backs don’t have a large fan base because nobody’s from here. I don’t have to take off my shoes to count the number of people I’ve met in two years here who were born and raised in Arizona. The area is full of transplants from all over the country, and a lot of those people still keep their loyalties with their hometown teams and just…don’t seem to care about the D-backs.”
JenK, this is EXACTLY the issue we have here in CO. So many of us were born and raised in other states and fled the Midwest due to impending unemployment that the main fans are the “natives” who are proud to have their own team. Granted, a lot of them were fairweather fans that lost interest after the first two seasons and hopped back on the bandwagon when they started winning, but… it is disheartening when it’s the World Series, you work 25 miles from Coors Field, and yet the Red Sox fans are almost as numerous in your office as the Rockies fans. It has been fun over the last year see people start to genuinely care that we have a professional baseball team in the state. The Rockies are just lucky that they peaked when the beloved Broncos were at their nadir.
Plus, one of their minor-league affiliates is the Casper Ghosts, which is my favorite punny sports team.
The thing that kills baseball at the ballpark for me is the ballpark as in place to hang out. The place is full of people who are there specifically for the things that annoy me. They don’t watch the game, make incredibly stupid comments about the game and the players, don’t cheer at the right times, boo at completely stupid times, and basically make me feel like an old grump for being annoyed by them. But I’ve discovered that if I sit in the 300 level, there are other people keeping score, they’re watching the game, and I can have a decent conversation about the game, so it’s a matter of not sitting down with the corporate (it’s like you bought them a pony for their birthday) crowd or up in the cheap seats (it’s the bitter ring of hell–I can’t afford a better seat so I’m going to make sure everyone around me is as miserable about that as I am crew)–if I’m in the medium seats, it’s actually baseball, which except for interleague play, which proves that even if the Phillies manage to make it to the WS they won’t know what to do when they get there, is pretty fun in Philadelphia these days.
Hee! I se in today’s paper that Jeter has signed up with Gillette; no word if he’s got to shave with Tiger, Roger and Thierry.
Great post.
I agree with pretty much everything Sars writes here.
And if I could come at the same point from a slightly different angle I’d phrase it this way. To the folks obsessed with micro-managing what baseball “is†or “isn’tâ€â€¦.“What is the goal exactly? What is the perfect solution?†If you can lay out what it is you want, perhaps then we can start working on a solution to that problem.
And I realize I’m not being perfectly clear. Soccer is perhaps the most popular sport in the world. And yet the predominate criticism is that it hasn’t caught on here the way some people want it to. The WNBA has never turned a profit, but we are inundated with promos for it during the NBA Finals. NASCAR is (by most measures) the second most popular/successful “sport†in the US, yet every article I’ve read the last two years bemoans the economic slowdown…or at least a stalling in its growth.
And my response is…..SO?! This just in: Every sport/activity/pastime/distraction cannot be #1 all at the same time! I’m not un-American. I’m not anti-capitalism. I realize that competition and the drive to dominate is ingrained in our culture. Second place is not good enough and the prevailing wisdom is that if you aren’t growing and thriving, you’re dying. This permeates our corporate culture as well. Simply turning a profit every year is not sufficient. If you don’t show robust profits to satisfy your shareholders; if you don’t acquire others you’re going to get acquired and all of that.
But people…everything cannot be the next big thing. Not in a world where competition for dollars, free time and viable entertainment options is so fierce. Isn’t it OK that a sport merely IS?
The NHL (hockey being my favorite sport to watch and play) nearly killed itself with this obsession to expand to the south and its insistence that it was one of the four MAJOR sports in this country. Well, who cares if it isn’t? It doesn’t change the product. It doesn’t change that it’s still insanely good to see in person. Is it a bummer nobody talks about Ovechkin at the water cooler here like they do Tiger Woods? Sure. I guess. But (and maybe I’m alone in this) I don’t need the masses to confirm to me that the things I like are awesome. The NHL can be a 2nd tier quasi-league for all I care. The games are still good, and they are ALL available with the right cable package.
So I guess my point is…..in trying to be #1, and insisting that things aren’t OK because not EVERYONE is tuning in or showing up, you run the risk of ruining what you DID have and actually turning off your current (longtime and loyal) fans. I don’t think you really want the fringe band-wagoners anyway do you? I mean, you’ll happily take their money when your team makes the their random Championship run (Diamondbacks, Carolina Hurricans) or whatever, but do you want to set policy that caters to people who are so easily swayed from one activity to the next?
This final thought is actually cribbed from my boy Steve Czaban with Fox Sports in DC so I can’t take credit for it. But think about tennis for a minute. In the 70’s, tennis was the next big thing. You can’t kick a can without it landing on a (usually vacant) tennis court in a most mid-sized American burgs. It was popular on TV, and people played it. It was nearly as quaint a memory as stickball itself. And now? Not so much. Tennis courts get skateboard traffic or are adorned with basketball hoops to become multi-use facilities. And there is currently NOTHING WRONG with the game of tennis. It’s merely withdrawn to its more natural popularity equilibrium. Some folks watch it, it’s a nice club sport for active middle-aged individuals etc. To quote many a lazy athlete interviewee…â€It is what it isâ€. And that can be OK. Things are cyclical. In 40 more years, the NBA might be a niche like the NHL. Golf might be the new tennis with acres of courses being co-opted for other purposes. Even the mighty NFL might have succumbed to a new lesser status. If you love a sport, in this instance baseball….then watch it, attend it, cover it, write about it, share it and most of all cherish it. If careful and learned people want to lovingly refine the experience at the ballpark or on TV…great! More power to you. But if the “end game†is to return baseball or anything else, to its pinnacle of popularity….especially with rose-tinted, nostalgia-clouded gimmickry….then you’re wasting everyone’s time.
I am a perfect example of the fact that baseball CAN still attract new fans, even today. I spent the first 18 years of my life in Michigan and never followed professional or college sports (and let me tell you how hard it is to explain that you don’t care who wins the Michigan/Michigan State game. Guh). My parents were both musicians, neither of them were Michigan natives, so team loyalty just wasn’t part of my life.
My husband, on the other hand, grew up with Michigan native parents and knew the pain that accompanied being a loyal to the Tigers and the Lions. When I did start caring about baseball, thanks to roommates who were loyal to their home teams, I naturally gravitated toward the Tigers, and while this choice has brought me some definite heartache, I don’t regret becoming a fan one bit.
Yes, I definitely think the sport has some problems, but I’m madly in love with it, and show me one relationship in life that doesn’t occasionally make you pull your hair out in frustration. If I hadn’t fallen in love with the sport and my team, I would have never known the joy of hating Sheff, never stayed up until the wee hours of the morning watching the postgame analysis of Verlander’s no-hitter, never known the hillarity of having my Cardinals-loving best friend drunk dial me after they beat us in the Series, never subjected my husband to my rotating list of Baseball Boyfriends. I’ll tolerate some annoyance if it means getting to experience all those things.
A-freaking-men.
Do some ballparks really not sing Take Me Out To The Ballgame anymore?
I’m a Cubs fan who lives less than a mile from Wrigley Field, and baseball is as much of a part of summer as street fairs and bbqs. I guess thanks to the history of the park, not much has changed there (including not winning a WS in 100 years). There’s not as much day ball as there used to be and the bleachers are actually some of the most expensive seats, but no JumboTron and sell-outs for most games also mean virtually no between-inning antics.
I understand the TV people wanting to keep to their schedules, but, damn. Why would you want a ballgame to be any shorter? Sitting in the sunshine on a perfect summer day, drink and dog in hand……whether it’s the ’03 Cubs or the ’06 Cubs, it just doesn’t get any better than that.
Sars, Strahan did the Campbell’s soup dealy, too. They also did it with Jerome Bettis, so you’re still right.
I do wish it was still only two divisions, just like I wish it was still only 3 football. I just like symmetry in my divisions. They didn’t have it before, then when they moved teams around to be able to have it, they changed the number of divisions. It drove me crazy.
You get the same number of post-season teams with two wild cards and then it’s the four best team from the division going to the playoffs and the playoff format is simplified to W1 v E2, E1 v. W2 — no more dealing with the wild-card-coming-from-the-same-division issue. It’s not a MLB deal breaker for me, but I would prefer it the other way.
‘I do agree that the dearth of day games is problematic for youth interest…’
One of my favorite childhood memories is cooling off in the A/C at my Grandma’s after mowing her lawn and watching a Cubs games with her while eating Pringles and drinking pop (we only got good snacks at her house). I watched a ton of baseball all summer long because it was that or soaps and I liked baseball way more (oh, we lived in the country and didn’t get cable- hell, I had to go into Grandma’s for WGN even). So, while I miss day games, I don’t think kids would be watching them all that much anyway. And if they wanted to watch games that were slated for after bedtime, they could freaking Tivo them and watch them the next day. Heh!
‘Kids don’t play baseball casually anymore…’
I think that in addition to their lives being more regimented, they also have more options when it comes to sports and activities. When I was a kid, if you wanted to play sports and were under the age of 12, baseball and softball were your only options. My 6 year old nephew plays soccer, t-ball and wrestles. And while I think that’s great, it’s also going to mean a change in focus.
My Dad and I have been having long talks recently about ‘kids these days’. My 10 year old niece is playing softball now and he’s frustrated with how the girls are playing. Honestly, he’s remembering coaching me at 12 and 13 and trying to marry that up with 9 and 10 year olds. It just doesn’t work, but I can’t convince him that no, I really didn’t focus on the game rather than giggling and talking when I was sitting the bench at that age.
I think things will change for a while, but baseball isn’t going anywhere and doesn’t need to have anything done to it to make it stand the test of time. It’s done that and will continue to do that because it’s a great game.
The thing is – I used to love the game and I didn’t care who played. Yes, I’m a born and bred Reds fan, but any game that came on was the one I watched. I rooted for the Reds, against the Dodgers and Yankees, but watched anyone, because I just loved to watch the game. I kept score the way my mom taught me, I watched TWIB, caught the box scores, followed the batting, RBI and pitching races, had a serious passion for the utility guys who played every position. The only ball I watch now is down at our local park. None of my plethora of nieces and nephews even own a baseball mitt.
Makes me sad, I think.
I love it when you talk baseball…it makes me all tingly, and I agree with your entire essay.
I do have one wish…I really wish it were possible to choose which regional game to watch (without paying for the privilege). I am a die-hard Florida Marlins fan. Before the Marlins came to S. Florida, baseball was something I had on TV while I did something else. Oh, I’d usually watch the WS, but that was about it…but then…
And…then I moved to Middle Tennessee where the only games we get are the Braves or Reds (or whatever’s on ESPN or Fox). So, I only get to see the Marlins on television when they are playing those two teams because, God forbid Fox or ESPN should show a Marlins game, even when the team is doing well.
If MLB really wants to bring down the average length of a ballgame by 15 minutes or so, it should just ship Steve Trachsel off to some far-flung island and shred his passport.
I fear this will sound incredibly dorky, but I’m a 26-year-old who became a baseball fan in the past year because of the Rockies. So…not all hope is lost. :-)
Anyone else hear what Joe Buck said re: game lengths? I don’t know if he was serious or kidding.
I’ll see if I can find a link.
Well, duh, it’s at
http://www.awfulannouncing.com
I know every other major sport has gone in this direction, but I HATE that part of the playoffs are on cable now. This is a personal issue though, because I don’t have cable and I realize most people do. Still, talk about pricing lower-income fans out of the game.
Also, as far as game length, the last several televised baseball games I sat through, only one of which could be considered low scoring, were all at least half an hour shorter than any of the recent NBA Finals games.
Heh, here in West Florida it’s easy to blame the lack of Rays fans on people being from other parts of the country, buuuut I think it’s really because, on top of non-locals, we’ve had a shitty team for so very long, which means next to no national coverage. On top of that, we had crappy marketing from the get-go and lunatics in the front office making sure the team never established any identity–much less a charismatic one. Now that they haven’t been shitty for, like, an extended portion of a season, I do feel guilty that even the SportsCenter guys (not to mention local radio, etc.) are pleading with locals to attend the games. (This week’s series with the BoSox has had above-average turnout, natch.)
‘Course, on top of the crappy teams and certifiable ownership of years past, we also still have to contend with a really crappy indoor stadium for a team whose name and logo now imply…sunshine?
I haven’t gone through the essays yet, but I wonder if part of the problem, in terms of kids becoming fans, is the particular patterns of immigration. If the majority of immigrants were coming in from Venezuela and Cuba, then baseball probably wouldn’t have to do much to attract fans, but that the majority of Hispanic/Latino immigration is from Mexico might mean (I’m speculating here) that there are lots of kids whose parents grew up idolizing Diego Maradona and Pele, not Roberto Clemente.
If I were a team president nowadays, I’d be bending over backwards to simultaneously broadcast in Spanish, print programs in English and Spanish, send out the Spanish-speaking players to do publicity. I believe Omar Minaya has been doing some of this, which makes it all the more disappointing that he has messed up the actual baseball part of his job so thoroughly.
A purely speculative question: if Griffey had juiced, would he have been able to avoid some of those injuries?
@Jessica: I’ve always wondered that myself. I think he could have healed more quickly with some of the PEDs, but it depends on the injury.
But look what he did anyway. Baseball Tonight showed his walk-off home run about seven times the other night, and once again I was amazed at how he seems to hit more or less the same attractive postcard parabola every time. His first one looked like that, the one I saw him jack in spring training years ago looked like that, #600 looked like that…I’m not assigning any meaning to it, it’s just cool.
One addditional thought I had about the ad is that I think one of the reasons why they chose the people they did is that it is geared towards both a U.S. and a European audience. I live in London and I’ve seen it on TV over here.
With the amount of money they must have paid Tiger, Federer and Henry (who is no longer with Arsenal, BTW, he is now squandering his talent at Barcelona) I can understand why they would want to have the most globally appealing celebrities possible.
“But what happened to the excitement that surrounded him and McGwire and guys like that back then?”
I can’t stand their pizza, which I’ve clarified in another TN comment elsewhere, but Imo’s, a pizza chain in St. Louis, had this awesome McGwire commercial back in the day. I am so happy that YouTube has it.
Of note is that the commercial doesn’t actually feature McGwire, I’m sure because he would have been too expensive. Also, this was before steroids hit the fan…
We still quote this commercial, years later. “No, you WILL do it!”
“It’s interesting that, in that razor commercial purporting to feature the best of the best — Tiger, Roger Federer, and a soccer player whose name is escaping me at the moment, as every soccer player’s except Becks’s and Pele’s tends to do — the marketing division couldn’t produce an NFL player or a guy like Alex Rodriguez.”
Last night I saw the new Gillette Fusion ad, and Thierry Henry has been replaced by Derek Jeter. Since I’d just read this entry, it was almost eerie.