You should love baseball. You really should. And the fact that you don’t? Well it sucks for you and it sucks for our country.
I’ve been reading a lot of stories over the past year about TV ratings, attendance and overall interest in “America’s pastime.” (That I have to put that phrase in quotations makes me sick.) The bottom line is this: unarguably, baseball has been slacking. It’s not dying, but it isn’t thriving like it has for the past 100 years, either.
After 2001’s emotional World Series between the Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees, which took place just over a month after Sept. 11, World Series viewership has been way down. The best TV results since came during Boston’s 2004 World Series victory when they averaged over 25 million viewers. Although this seems like a nice number, it pales in comparison to the monster popularity of the ‘70s and ‘80s when the Series was regularly averaging over 35 million TV viewers, according to the Baseball Almanac.
In terms of attendance, not only is baseball not as successful as other sports in pulling a live audience — this is based on stadium size alone, though the 162 game schedule versus other sports’ 16-game and 82-game schedule surely plays a factor in attendance density– but baseball’s attendance has been lacking even by its own standards. CBS Chicago released a report last fall, noting that the MLB was facing a fourth straight year of total attendance decline. In other words, since 2007, baseball attendance has been subtly dwindling every season since.
To me, this wouldn’t be such a problem if baseball’s beauty wasn’t being replaced by the odor-ridden, muscle-building concussion freak-show that is American football. Truly, I say this as a football fan. But mostly I say it as a fan of all sports: Give civility back. By making football the most popular sport in America, you took civility, stomped it and ran half the country’s virtues into the ground.
Again, to emphasize, I like football a lot. I like playing it and watching it and writing about it. But to stand by and watch while it murders baseball? Would you stand by and watch a good friend try to kill your mother?
According to a recent Harris Poll, also reported by CBS, in 2010 when 2,200 adults were asked what their favorite sport was, 31 percent chose football at first place and 17 percent chose baseball. In just a year, though, the divide gaped. In 2011, 36 percent chose football compared to 13 percent for baseball.
I see the appeal. Similar to the circus, our minds are stimulated by the possibility of injury: the big hits and the 350-pound mammoths. The strategy in football is in no way simple, blocking schemes, hitch-and-go routes and five step drops litter the sport. I would argue, though, that a reason it has overtaken baseball is a lower common denominator of fan interest and intelligence. To sit down and watch a baseball game and enjoy it, you have to have a basic understand of the rules: balls and strikes, stolen bases and fielding. If you sit just to watch them hit the ball far, it may be a long night.
In football, though, you can be base. This isn’t to say all football fans are base or even that most are, but an appeal over baseball is that you can be stupider. All you have to know is to run straight and stay on your feet. If you do that long enough, or you decide to kick the ball through some poles, you get points.
Whoever has more points wins in both sports, but the way you get those points is a bit more complex in baseball.
Baseball isn’t the only sport affected by our desire as a country to enjoy something while understanding as little about it as possible, though; lacrosse is surging in colleges and high schools (places of education) but it isn’t making much of a dent in the professional world. Cricket, a game enjoyed internationally, has never been embraced. Both games require some work to comprehend.
There is a scoring dilemma that has led people away from baseball that might be the most representational of our country’s biggest issue. For the record, bigger isn’t better. A common joke about low-scoring football games is that the scoreboard resembles a baseball final score, such as 7-0 or 10-6. Bobby might turn to his friend in the middle of his son’s football game which is tied 6-6 and remark, “Hey! I didn’t know I was coming to a baseball game today!”
This notion that football is more exciting because it’s a higher scoring game is a complete misconception. Every time someone scores in football, they’re rewarded with two, three, six or seven points. This system was created to differentiate which form of scoring should be most valuable to the final score, but it’s turned into a cheap complement of the sport. The bottom line is that in a 5-3 baseball game, eight people scored. In a 28-21 football game, there were seven scores (extra points notwithstanding.) We as a culture, though, have decided that bigger numbers mean better sports and more excitement, more glory. But really people, what’s wrong with 5-3? Why’s everything got to be so big?
The most disturbing topic about interest in baseball dwindling is that it’s the least racist sport. Though this is a huge, broad, charged statement, I honestly believe it.
The first thing to remember about racism is that it’s more about the idea and treatment than it is about numbers, though we get fed so many “equal-opportunity employer” statements that it’s hard to not focus on just statistics. Either way, the breakdown of baseball and football look like this (according to the 2011 Race and Gender Report Cards) – In the MLB, roughly 61 percent of players are white, 27 percent are Hispanic, nine percent are black and two percent are Asian. In the NFL, 67 percent of players are black, 30 percent are white, two percent are Asian and one percent are Hispanic.
By seeing that the NFL is much more predominantly black, without thinking, some may think this means the league is less racist than the white dominated MLB. This just simply isn’t true. Our country is 60 percent white, but that doesn’t mean we are more or less racist than any other country. The way racism should be judged is not just whether white and black get along. It’s about a blending of all cultures and international appeal. Baseball represents three ethnicities strongly compared to the NFL’s two. Baseball is an international sport.
There is also a lack of stereotypes. Any person of any ethnicity can be any type of player depending on body type and skill. Prince Fielder is a black power-hitting first baseman. Albert Pujols is a Latino power-hitting first baseman. Mark Teixeira is a white power-hitting first baseman. Each is a star at the same position without a second thought put towards their race.
In football, it’s different. Ninety-nine percent of cornerbacks in 2008 were black compared to eight percent of quarterbacks (according to a report by Smith College in 2008). Eighty-seven percent of running backs compared with 17 percent of centers. The segregation of positions coupled with the NFL’s two main ethnicities versus baseball’s three shows a different view of race. For a sport that was desegregated quite late in comparison, baseball has made leaps and bounds to show it truly is an equal opportunity employer.
The point is not to say we shouldn’t play football because it promotes violence, injures our children’s brains simultaneously as they are in an institution of education or kills the concept of the humble athletes. The point isn’t to say baseball promotes a sense of calm blended with excitement or a system that has worked to reward hard work and mend its blatant and wrong acceptance of cheating.
The point is that baseball, a representation of this country’s ups and downs, is in the midst of a slow regression towards second-place. I’m not saying it’s the worst thing ever; I’m just saying it isn’t good.