Posted By:
Al C.risafulliI will continue to maintain my belief that baseball is the most popular non-motor sport in this country.
Sure, suveys will tell you that football is their favorite sport. I think there are a couple of reasons for this:
1. Football happens during a time of year when there's fewer other activities for spectators to do outside. How many people would stay holed up inside and watch baseball if it were 8 degrees outside?
2. Football teams play once a week, on a day most everyone is home, during the day. If baseball games were ONLY on Sundays, how many people would become week-to-week fanatics? Instead, with baseball, the games are on every day, usually at night.
3. The football season is 16 games long. Every game is critical - already there are teams that have no shot at the postseason. With a 162 game schedule, a fan could miss two weeks of games and really not have those games be meaningful in the scope of an entire season.
4. Baseball games are on TV mostly during prime time, when there's lots of other competition for TV viewership. Football games are on TV on Sunday afternoons, when there's nothing else on.
I agree with those that say football appears to be a faster-moving game (although in reality, it is not). I also agree with those that say that TV coverage of baseball is dismal.
Football and basketball also do a much better job marketing their players. Why? In baseball, they have arbitration. You can't have the Cardinals marketing the hell out of Albert Pujols, because eventually they'll have to go to an arbitration hearing where they have to prove that he's not worth what he's asking for. So teams don't market their individual players very much. As such, teams lose some of their personality.
The reality is that paid attendance at major league baseball games was at an all-time high this year. Something like 76 million. I also heard that paid attendance at pro ballgames in general - including minor leagues - was also at an all-time high.
I think Fox and ESPN need to fix their broadcasts, not reduce their number. Get some exciting camera shots, try and illustrate the intensity of the game. I think baseball in general needs to back off on the ridiculous suspensions for fighting and purpose pitches and such. If the game could get back to the hard-nosed, semi contact sport that it once was, and the networks could make an effort to reduce the lengthy camera shots on one player, and maybe hire some broadcasters who could educate the viewers on the strategy and history of the game, more people might watch.
-Al