Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

[nelinho]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

Is there anything more boring than baseball ??

cricket?

Test cricket in particular. 4 days per game

[unkle]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

^^^^
I dont even know
the rules of cricket.
But, yes, is boring.

[nelinho]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

Heroin addicts think the game moves to slow.

[MusicJatt]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

soccer is one of the few sports where I would rather watch someone playing FIFA than watch a match.

[nelinho]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

Your commentators don't help the experience....

"we are live at the soccer world championship play off series* and Eye-tally** will have an apex restart***"

*world cup
*Italy not Eye-Tally
***Corner kick not apex restart

presented with the cheesiest Californian surf's up dude accent.

[floridaorange]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

http://fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/football-baseball-and-the-evolving-tastes-of-fans/?_r=0

declining viewership for sure.

Football, Baseball and the Evolving Tastes of Fans

By ANDY BENOITMajor League Baseball is under way, and its Saturday afternoon ratings are down slightly from last year. That’s nothing new. In October, the sensational Cardinals and Rangers’ seven-game World Series drew an average of 16.6 million viewers a night. Before that, the last time a Cardinals World Series went seven games was 1987; the average nightly audience was 35 million.
Over the years, you have heard myriad explanations for baseball’s declining ratings: cable and satellite TV have given viewers a panoply of channels; much of media has migrated to the Web; the increasing sophistication of video game consoles has created a more appealing form of home entertainment. All are valid explanations. But they have not seemed to detract from America’s new favorite pastime, pro football.
The rating for this year’s first Saturday afternoon M.L.B. on FOX was 2.3. That’s about 10 percent of the audience that Fox’s Sunday afternoon N.F.L. Week 1 telecast attracted. Obviously, a regular-season baseball game and a regular-season N.F.L. game do not make an apples-to-apples comparison (there are 10 times more regular-season M.L.B. games, 162 per team, than N.F.L. games, 16 per team). But if they were apples, one would be rotten and the other perfectly ripe. Another example of lopsided numbers: the TV audience for Game 7 of the Cardinals-Rangers series drew two million fewer viewers than the N.F.L.’s Packers-Saints Thursday night opener last fall. So, essentially, baseball’s Super Bowl equals football’s season opener.

Fifty years ago, no one would have predicted that football would trump baseball in a popularity (non)contest. But they probably should have. Baseball’s declining allure has nothing to do with performance-enhancing drug scandals, big and small market inequality or even the natural ebb and flow of popular entertainment. It has to do with the sport itself. There’s no room for progressive change in baseball. Literally. There’s not enough space.
Including end zones, a football field is 120 yards long and 53 yards wide, giving it a playing-surface area of 8,242,560 square inches. Eight million-plus square inches is a lot of space in which to mobilize participants. Thus, as players become more athletic and skilled, and as schemes become more creative and intricate, there is room to accommodate the advancements.
Baseball, on the other hand, has a playing surface area of 216 square inches. That’s the area of home plate. Yes, baseball fields are about the same overall size as football fields, but the field does not become relevant until someone hits one of the pitches thrown to home plate. The sport hinges on what takes place near those 216 square inches. There are only so many things an athlete can do when confined to such tight parameters. Or, as we’ve found out, there are only four things: throw a strike or a ball and swing the bat or don’t.
Granted, this is an oversimplification of a long-lived sport. But it is a clear explanation for why baseball has always been married to the past. By its very nature, baseball’s past is its present. You cannot centralize a sport around 216 square inches and ever expect it to significantly change. Consequently, baseball players today cannot really show off the fact that they are faster and stronger than those of yesterday. Even when they get past those 216 square inches by putting the ball in play, the batter still has to run to the exact same place that the players from yesterday ran to. There’s just no chance for new displays of physical ability.
This is largely why there is so much monotony and downtime in baseball, and why so much emphasis has been placed on peripheral nonsense known as the unwritten rules. In baseball, if a guy hits a monster home run and stares at it for an extra second and a half, he has committed a blatant violation of etiquette and could be subject to a beanball next time at the plate. A pitcher yelling at a batter who is jogging to first base? Such disrespect can be grounds for a bench-clearing brawl. Or, as Dallas Braden reminded everyone two years ago, a base runner jogging back to the dugout after a third out had better not cut across the mound and step on the rubber. If he does, he is showing up the pitcher. Or the home team. Or the grounds crew. Or whoever it was that simply decided such short cuts aren’t cool.
Can you imagine anyone in the N.F.L. even batting an eye (let alone fighting) at such inconsequential stuff? Of course not – everyone in football is too busy trying to figure out new strategies to take advantage of all that luscious field space.
Another, and more recognized, reason for baseball and football’s widening popularity gap is that baseball is really an individual sport that happens to be played by teams. The battle in that 216-square-inch area involves only a pitcher and batter (sorry Johnny Bench fans, but at the end of the day a catcher can only be as effective as the pitcher he is catching for). One-on-one sports do not have a lot of inherent room for natural growth (see the rise and fall of boxing; or America’s relative indifference to tennis, a sport in which the signature domestic event – the United States Open – has, over the last 20 years, attracted a television audience of two million to three million).
Is baseball dying? The ratings, the sport’s own natural evolutionary limitations and the history of similar sports say yes. It’s just a matter of how quickly. The rate of baseball’s demise can easily turn into something of a mathematical argument based on presumption and perspective (two things that do not mix well with numbers). Major League Baseball came about in 1869. The sport’s golden age – its teenage years, if you will – was the 1920s to 1960s. So perhaps baseball hasn’t even reached its midlife crisis yet.
The problem with this timing and perspective is it does not consider that society’s taste for entertainment evolves much faster now than it did in the 1790s, 1870s or even 1960s. A sport could once thrive or just survive by mastering the art of not evolving, but inevitably there comes an era where you pay the bill for that. There’s enough pageantry at an M.L.B. park to persuade even non-sports fans to attend games, so filling 50,000-seat stadiums should not become a problem any time soon. But the real sports money comes from mass viewership. Right now, mass viewership occurs primarily via TV; down the road it may be via tablets, mobile devices or some other form of technology that is yet to be invented. It does not matter; whatever the viewing platform, baseball will still be boring in comparison to other sports that have the physical space and healthy number of live-action participants necessary to evolve.
There’s no one to blame for this. Bud Selig, or whomever the next commissioner will be, can alter baseball’s rules or business model, but because he has only 216 square inches to work with, he cannot significantly alter the sport itself. In comparison, football, if evolution ever dictated, could change to the point that tackling no longer existed. Some might argue that it would then no longer be football. That’s irrelevant; the point is the National Football League would still exist. Football is malleable enough to become whatever its audience wants it to be. This is why the N.F.L. is here to stay. Baseball isn’t malleable. The only way baseball would have a chance at catching up to the N.F.L. is if Major League Baseball were Major League Something Else.

Baseball might be back in full swing, but in the big scheme of things, fewer people are watching. Meanwhile, the N.F.L. draft is just a little over a week away and new ratings record will probably be set. Evolution at work.

[Garrick]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

pretty good article. i agree with most of it. i guess the question is 'what is one's definition of pasttime?" i still think that baseball stands as America's foundational sport. it meant much more to this nation over the course of it's history than just a game. but football is much more exciting and the dynamics are far more diverse.

having said that, baseball is boring to many people, but i still enjoy it. i do think the regular season is a bit ridiculous. 164 games just gets to be monotonous. you get more bang for your buck with football... it is definitely this nation's favorite sport now. college and pro. i just wish tickets were reasonable to actually GO to a game and not have to fork over my fucking pension to get tickets.

[Jenks]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

lol. that article is garbage, baseball is better than ever!! my perception might be skewed though because I live in baseball mecca.

[floridaorange]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

Reality Check Regarding Downward Trends For 2013 MLB Attendance - Forbes

[Jenks]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

Attendance is down for NFL too. Two things:

1. HDTV - my setup at home is way better than my seat at the game

2. $$$$ - it's fucking expensive to go to professional sports games. Ticket, beer, hotdog - assrape. I can sit on my couch with a 55" plasma, all the awesome beer I want, home made food, room full of buddies, and have a way better time than going to a pro event. I say pro, because college football is a ridiculously fun environment to witness live.

[nelinho]

Re: Is baseball still America's favorite pasttime?

Aus baseball season is about 35 games long and shown via ustream and the stars are struggling to get games in AA league or Japanese feeder teams.

Going to games is better than ustream lol it is mostly volunteers running the show.

What are attendances like at spring training or minor leagues in the US? What is media coverage like of these leagues compared to nfl minor league equivalents.?


What about participation rate?

You are far more likely to play baseball/softball into your 40's than American football.