Pace of game rules in the AFL saved an average of 10 min off the game time

[soxhop411]

https://twitter.com/MLBPipeline/status/522152914949644288
 
MLB Pipeline ‏@MLBPipeline  50s50 seconds ago
Watch live at 9:35 ET as the 20-second pitch clock is enforced for the first time in the AFL: http://atmlb.com/HDeuS1 

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

For Friday's game, the preliminary numbers show 11.2 million viewers for Blue Bloods on CBS, and 9.9 million for Game 3 of the World Series, though the World Series did garner a larger 18-49 share (9%) than anything else on Friday. This could be the second game in World Series history (at least in the last 50 years) not to reach 10 million viewers.

By comparison, about 44 million watched the Series in 1978 on average. More than 50 million watched Game 7 in 1986 (aka the game after Buckner). A pitch clock is only the start of what baseball needs right now. And 20 seconds is a long, long time to stand there and look at a sign anyway.

To answer the question of why I still participate on SoSH even though I don't watch baseball games... Football. This crowd has more than its share of knowledgeable football fans.

 

[Max Power]

But you clearly don't like baseball as a sport. There's nothing that can be done that's going to reach someone like you. I don't give a shit about football and if they were to somehow cut down on the concussions and suicides, I'd be happy, but I still wouldn't watch.
 
Baseball's biggest issue is how regional it is. The games draw well, local TV ratings are always great, but your average baseball fan doesn't watch when their team isn't involved. Maybe making the game less of a time commitment will help keep those local fans tuned in. It probably won't make a huge difference, but cutting down the time the pitcher holds the ball certainly can't hurt. There's nobody who likes watching the pace Clay Buchholz sets.

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

I was a huge baseball fan for a long time. It didn't used to be so regional. And not all teams do well locally (CSN Houston pulled some 0.0 ratings the last couple of seasons - meaning about 1,000 people tuned in within a marketplace of millions) like the Red Sox.

The structure is off. Baseball is set up like a marathon. You have 162 games to determine the best teams, and the best teams win about 60% of the time. If you rely on a system where getting to the playoffs is everything, then once it becomes apparent that your local team can't reach the playoffs, you tune out. Once you tune out, it's hard to tune back in.

The World Series was once an exhibition. It was the celebration of the marathon, where you got to see the best team from each league earn its reward. You won "the pennant" for winning your league. Baseball fans tuned in to see that celebration.

Today, I doubt that most fans know what "the pennant" means. Everything is focused on the playoffs. Divisions were split, then split again. Wild card teams were added, then added again. Battles for the playoffs are between teams that win about 54-55% of their games. This year's Series is the first between teams that didn't even win 90 during the season. Short playoff series are fairly random when you're pitting 55% against 60%. So there's lingering doubt and frustration when you finally do have a good team, but it loses a five-game series over one big random inning. The league continues to emphasize the notion that the World Series, once a celebration of continued excellence, is in itself some sort of fair, structured playoff like you have in sports with shorter seasons where the best teams win far more often.

Add to that the fact that the product itself is inferior. Technology has made viewing difficult - constant closeups of chewing and spitting rather than longer shots establishing perspective. Longer television breaks, where, again, the technology has changed in that commercials are louder and vie for your attention with annoying noises and visuals. Baseball is a peaceful game, but baseball telecasts are anything but peaceful.

I'm not alone. Ratings show fairly clearly that baseball is in a death spiral while football continues to gain yardage. The Red Sox, with consistent and solid local ratings, are quite healthy. They draw even when they lose. But that's the exception rather than the rule. Kids aren't watching. Ratings will only continue to slide.

A 20-second clock isn't peaceful. It certainly can't hurt to light a fire under Buchholz. But it's just one more closeup distraction in a game that almost works better on radio than on television. Baseball needs radical intervention in terms of how it's presented, not a shot clock. I'd start by taking out the divisions and the wild-card games and greatly reducing the number of commercials and number of cameras.

 

[HriniakPosterChild]

Baseball is a peaceful game, but baseball telecasts are anything but peaceful.

Tell that to anyone who stepped into the box against Nolan Ryan.

 

[LogansDad]

 
If you rely on a system where getting to the playoffs is everything, then once it becomes apparent that your local team can't reach the playoffs, you tune out

 
I'd start by taking out the divisions and the wild-card games

 
If anything the wild card games have made fans of teams that would otherwise be out of their division races continue to tune in.  I'm not sure how eliminating those is a good thing for ratings.

 

[HriniakPosterChild]

If anything the wild card games have made fans of teams that would otherwise be out of their division races continue to tune in.  I'm not sure how eliminating those is a good thing for ratings.

 
Well, you start by contracting the leagues to eight teams each....

 

[Rasputin]

I should be

 

[Rasputin]

I should be the God of baseball. The wild card games would be three game series played over two days.

All the others are seven game series with the of days between series drastically reduced.

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

 

 
If anything the wild card games have made fans of teams that would otherwise be out of their division races continue to tune in.  I'm not sure how eliminating those is a good thing for ratings.

 

Because baseball fails when you have that attitude. That wasn't the case when baseball was our national pastime. Baseball works best, like soccer, when you measure teams over the course of the entire season.

In soccer in England, the FA Cup is a fun diversion. Top teams even use their B lineups if an important league game is coming up. The season is the focus, and you enjoy seeing good teams play.

Baseball is the ultimate marathon sport. I know it seems like a paradox, but adding the wild card actually reduced local interest because it helped teach younger fans that the goal was to reach the playoffs, so if you're out, you stop watching. Less teams may be out of the playoffs now, but those who are tune out completely.

How can you have a situation where a local broadcast gets 1,000 viewers?

People say ratings died with the strike. But fans came back in '95. And they saw the wild card in action. An average of 29.0 million watched that World Series. Then 25.2 million the next year. And by 2000, with that inane Subway Series, they were down to a record-low (at the time) 18.1 million. They added another set of wild cards in 2012, and, lo-and-behold, another record low of 12.7 million viewers. This year will probably break that record.

But what about the Super Bowl? Super Bowl XXIX, in '95, drew 83.4 million viewers. Super Bowl XLVIII, this past February, drew a record 111.5 million. Last week, baseball threw the last game of the NLCS up against Thursday Night Football. Both scored a 1.2 in the 18-49 demo... on cable channels (NFL Network also runs the game). CBS scored a 5.4. This with a piddly little regular season NFL game (it was Jets/Patriots).

OK, I'm overselling football's gain and baseball's decline, but you can't look at these systems as deserving of the same approach. When two .550 teams play each other, even a seven-game series is like rolling dice. And we can pretend that baseball teams can be built for the playoffs, but what does that really mean? One pitch from a dominant starter and you've changed that equation. Because when bats hit balls, good wins out over mediocre more often than mediocre wins out over mediocre, but it takes about 20-30 games to begin to establish that.

Bottom line: baseball is trying to sell something that the NFL can sell and it can't. Baseball has to return to what made it great. And that has nothing to do with wild cards.

 

[Rasputin]

I think your argument is fundamentally flawed.

You can't make an argument that the wild card diminishes interest by looking at the television ratings of the world series.

If anything, you would look at the television ratings in cities involved in the wild card race during the regular season, but even that is terrible as TV ratings for almost everything are going down.

If you're going to look at TV ratings, it has to be in conjunction with things like ticket sales and if we had the number, actual attendance, for the teams in the wild card and the teams out of it.

And why is it that is more important that baseball have the best regular season teams in the championship than it is for football?

 

[rembrat]

Has anyone stopped to wonder if this accelerated pace could lead to even more arm/elbow injuries for pitchers? I don't care if Old Hoss Radbourn spun CGSO in 1:15 because reality is today's pitchers are bigger and stronger and they are throwing to equally bigger and stronger hitters. "How The Game Was Played" when Football only mattered in colleges and the NBA was a mom and pop shop and your TV didn't have a thousand channels shouldn't factor into todays game.

 

[Spacemans Bong]

Has anyone stopped to wonder if this accelerated pace could lead to even more arm/elbow injuries for pitchers? I don't care if Old Hoss Radbourn spun CGSO in 1:15 because reality is today's pitchers are bigger and stronger and they are throwing to equally bigger and stronger hitters. "How The Game Was Played" when Football only mattered in colleges and the NBA was a mom and pop shop and your TV didn't have a thousand channels shouldn't factor into todays game.

 
Considering how no change to the way pitchers are used has actually prevented pitching injuries, I don't see why the imagined threat of injuries happening at a higher rate should be a road bump to speeding up the game.

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

 

I think your argument is fundamentally flawed.

You can't make an argument that the wild card diminishes interest by looking at the television ratings of the world series.

If anything, you would look at the television ratings in cities involved in the wild card race during the regular season, but even that is terrible as TV ratings for almost everything are going down.

If you're going to look at TV ratings, it has to be in conjunction with things like ticket sales and if we had the number, actual attendance, for the teams in the wild card and the teams out of it.

And why is it that is more important that baseball have the best regular season teams in the championship than it is for football?

 

Because we can't have a football season long enough to establish a credible system of determining the best teams. So we approximate by putting together a fair playoff system aimed at getting the good teams in, and because fans are fans of the game, they watch the playoffs.

As we can see quite clearly from the ratings, it works for football.

Baseball's advantage is that you can play six days out of seven (not so much for pitchers, but since they're involved in every play when they do play, that's not an issue). You can determine the good teams, but the validity of a playoff system is questionable because good teams beat mediocre teams only 55-60% of the time.

You have to look at national ratings. That's the pool from which you draw attendance. How can we get excited about Derek Jeter visiting Fenway if we have no idea who Derek Jeter is?

You either throw up your hands and say all television is down in viewership (most is), or you look at how much it's down compared to other events. And there, baseball is faring very poorly. I think the wild card issue and the presentation issue are the reasons.

Attendance is healthy today, but where are tomorrow's seat-fillers?

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

20-30 years ago, the World Series averaged about double what the NBA finals averaged, in terms of viewers. More recently, the NBA gets about 10-20% more than MLB. We can disagree on cause, but baseball has experienced a spectacular decline in popularity in the last generation or so, and that has to be a concern moving forward as our children have no interest in the game.

 

[rembrat]

Considering how no change to the way pitchers are used has actually prevented pitching injuries, I don't see why the imagined threat of injuries happening at a higher rate should be a road bump to speeding up the game.

 
Nice.

 

[derekson]

 
True, and that article makes that distinction.  But I don't see how you separate the two.  If the pace increases, wouldn't games be shorter all things being equal?

 
I don't think anyone has addressed this yet, but if there was a post that talked about it and I missed it I am sorry.
 
All things aren't equal. Pace has slowed down more than looking at average time of game indicates because run scoring has been decreasing over the past several years, which means games should be getting shorter if played at the same pace, because fewer runners are getting on base and fewer runners are scoring, so the total number of PA per game is down. If we consider pace as time/PA, and time is up a bit and PA are down, pace has significantly slowed.

 

[timlinin8th]

Wow Chem, not for nothin' but you sound like a guy who longs hard for the good ol' days...
 

The structure is off. Baseball is set up like a marathon. You have 162 games to determine the best teams, and the best teams win about 60% of the time. If you rely on a system where getting to the playoffs is everything, then once it becomes apparent that your local team can't reach the playoffs, you tune out. Once you tune out, it's hard to tune back in.

 

Baseball is the ultimate marathon sport. I know it seems like a paradox, but adding the wild card actually reduced local interest because it helped teach younger fans that the goal was to reach the playoffs, so if you're out, you stop watching. Less teams may be out of the playoffs now, but those who are tune out completely.

 
Ok so this was stated twice. So "The Focus" of baseball should be on the regular season and the pennant... so what happens when a team is no longer in contention in the regular season? According to this logic, the fans will tune out. When there were no divisions and there were TEN teams in the league, the ones in the bottom half of the league knew they were out of contention for the pennant far before teams do now in the division era... you're looking back at a system that was so long ago it hardly holds any relevance anymore.
 

Attendance is healthy today, but where are tomorrow's seat-fillers?

 

We can disagree on cause, but baseball has experienced a spectacular decline in popularity in the last generation or so, and that has to be a concern moving forward as our children have no interest in the game.

 
"though the World Series did garner a larger 18-49 share (9%) than anything else on Friday." Thats plenty of younger viewers.
 
Look, in baseball's heyday, football had two smaller leagues, until the NFL merged with the AFL in 1969, the NBA was competing against the ABA (the two didn't merge until '76), hockey has always been a cold-weather sport and considered more of a "Canadian sport"... baseball had little competition from any other sports leagues. The "decline of baseball" is cited more because other leagues have had growth and eaten into baseball's marketshare, but absolutely ZERO of that has to do with how baseball was "in its heyday". If anything, the REASON MLB has made their steps into the Wild Card era (with multiple divisions etc) has been to ALLOW teams to stay in the mix until longer in the season and keep eyes glued to the sport at least through the summer months when it has less competition from other leagues. The "old school" baseball method would get utterly DESTROYED in todays environment.
 

As a kid, I remember being giddy about seeing the players announced for the WS- seemed like such a big deal and now, it just isn't. Times change. Baseball's biggest problem is that it thinks way too much about the way things once were.

 
There is this problem... For me the big issue is interleague. The World Series doesn't feel special anymore because National league teams are seen regularly now, where before, two teams matching up might be the first time they've seen each other in decades. I get the reason they brought along interleague (to try and get more national exposure to all the stars of the league) but thats been the one thing I don't think has worked from a playoff perspective.

 

[timlinin8th]

20-30 years ago, the World Series averaged about double what the NBA finals averaged, in terms of viewers. More recently, the NBA gets about 10-20% more than MLB. We can disagree on cause, but baseball has experienced a spectacular decline in popularity in the last generation or so, and that has to be a concern moving forward as our children have no interest in the game.

I wanted to pull this forward... 20-30 years ago, the NBA was just a little foundling compared to MLB. Basketball had ZERO national inroads until the NBA and ABA merged, and still hadn't gained a real "national" presence until the Michael Jordan era... To cite this as any sort of evidence is disingenuous.
 
*edit for clarity*

 

[HriniakPosterChild]

I wanted to pull this forward... 20-30 years ago, the NBA was just a little foundling compared to MLB. Basketball had ZERO national inroads until the NBA and ABA merged, and still hadn't gained a real "national" presence until the Michael Jordan era... To cite this as any sort of evidence is disingenuous.
 
*edit for clarity*

 
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson would not enjoy reading this post.

 

[timlinin8th]

 
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson would not enjoy reading this post.

 
I know they wouldn't, but while they got the NBA to new heights and helped establish the league in major markets, they really didn't help the "nationalization" of the game. Michael Jordan trancended basketball in ways they did not.
 
I doubt kids in Oklahoma regularly wore Celtics hats because of Larry Bird. And I'm sure some Lakers gear showed up because of Magic, but not like Jordan. Bulls and Jordan gear was EVERYWHERE in a way that has been unrivaled. Jordan opened the floodgates for the NBAs national exposure. NBA on NBC became HUGE in the Jordan era. You probably just heard its theme song in your head picturing a Bulls game.

 

[gaelgirl]

I think timlin has a good idea with interleague games making the World Series less unique. I hate interleague and always have. It's stupid, and there was a lot of novelty and interest in two teams matching up in the World Series that may not have played each other in decades. Would people be more interested in this World Series if the last time the Giants and Royals met up was, oh, never before in history? Not unless you count teams that left KC and became something else, or Spring Training. I think people are curious about those historic things. They could be touting it as the first time in history the Giants are coming to Kansas City for an official game, etc. It's not very often we have things happen for the first time in history. Instead, the last time they faced was in, like, July. Big whoop. 
 
I really, really hate interleague. 

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

 

Wow Chem, not for nothin' but you sound like a guy who longs hard for the good ol' days...
 
 
 
Ok so this was stated twice. So "The Focus" of baseball should be on the regular season and the pennant... so what happens when a team is no longer in contention in the regular season? According to this logic, the fans will tune out. When there were no divisions and there were TEN teams in the league, the ones in the bottom half of the league knew they were out of contention for the pennant far before teams do now in the division era... you're looking back at a system that was so long ago it hardly holds any relevance anymore.
 
 
 
"though the World Series did garner a larger 18-49 share (9%) than anything else on Friday." Thats plenty of younger viewers.
 
Look, in baseball's heyday, football had two smaller leagues, until the NFL merged with the AFL in 1969, the NBA was competing against the ABA (the two didn't merge until '76), hockey has always been a cold-weather sport and considered more of a "Canadian sport"... baseball had little competition from any other sports leagues. The "decline of baseball" is cited more because other leagues have had growth and eaten into baseball's marketshare, but absolutely ZERO of that has to do with how baseball was "in its heyday". If anything, the REASON MLB has made their steps into the Wild Card era (with multiple divisions etc) has been to ALLOW teams to stay in the mix until longer in the season and keep eyes glued to the sport at least through the summer months when it has less competition from other leagues. The "old school" baseball method would get utterly DESTROYED in todays environment.
 
 
There is this problem... For me the big issue is interleague. The World Series doesn't feel special anymore because National league teams are seen regularly now, where before, two teams matching up might be the first time they've seen each other in decades. I get the reason they brought along interleague (to try and get more national exposure to all the stars of the league) but thats been the one thing I don't think has worked from a playoff perspective.

 

I don't see 9% of 18-49s with sets on tuning into baseball as huge - not when that figure was 50% not that long ago. And the decline continues - it's not just increased competition, it's increased competition that beats the crap out of baseball more and more every year.

Not sure what you mean about longing for good ol' days. What, exactly, am I longing for that I can't have? It would be nice to have a World Series between teams that won the most games, so there's that.

I think baseball on television is a bad product. And wild cards and increased numbers of divisions have led to a mentality that the season is over once the local team is out of it. If meaningful games (for playoff contention) in September is some measure of popularity, then why isn't it equally bad, if not worse, when the best teams have wrapped up a playoff spot early on?

You don't tune out if the regular season is what it's all about. A marathon where the meaning comes from building something over the course of six months. I'd realign into four divisions, with only the winners playing a two-tier seven-game series.

 

[The Gray Eagle]

Albert Spalding was right, baseball is dying.
 
First baseball was crushed by the rise of bicycling, and then damaged again by the popularity of trap shooting:
"In 1892, the Boston Journal noted — in an article titled “The Decline of Base Ball” — that bicycling was the true sport of the age. In 1917, the Colorado Springs Gazette argued that baseball was losing ground to trap shooting. “The modern young man takes up a sport that he can actually do,” the Gazette reported. “No longer is he to be a bench warmer.”
 
So baseball will surely be trounced by the NBA too. Baseball has been dying and declining for 150 years now, no wonder teams are worth so little and no one wants to buy them.

 

[HriniakPosterChild]

I think timlin has a good idea with interleague games making the World Series less unique. I hate interleague and always have. 

 
Interleague play has also devalued the All-Star Game.
 
There was a time when people cared--whether or not "it counted." Ask Pete Rose or Ray Fosse. 

 

[gaelgirl]

   

I think baseball on television is a bad product. And wild cards and increased numbers of divisions have led to a mentality that the season is over once the local team is out of it. If meaningful games (for playoff contention) in September is some measure of popularity, then why isn't it equally bad, if not worse, when the best teams have wrapped up a playoff spot early on?

You don't tune out if the regular season is what it's all about. A marathon where the meaning comes from building something over the course of six months. I'd realign into four divisions, with only the winners playing a two-tier seven-game series.

 
In order for me to believe that, I'd have to see the local ratings of baseball over the last 25 years. Can't just cherry pick Houston's abysmal numbers, you'd have to look at all of them, individually and on aggregate. Since this is not my thesis, I sure as heck ain't gonna do that work. Please provide it to me. 
 
Also, anything on television right now is a bad product when compared to the ratings of old. The top-rated series these days, NCIS and Big Bang Theory, would have been about eighth and 15th back in 1984. The current fifth-rated series (Person of Interest) would have been outside the top 30. Television ratings have taken a huge hit as the number of options have increased. 
 
Speeding up play is a good idea. I don't want to see a giant clock and delay of game penalties, though. I think if they make it a habit in the minor leagues, it will be ingrained in the majors (making the clock unnecessary at this level). I also think pitchers being timely is great, but hitters also have to stay in the batter's box. In fact, that might be a bigger deal. They are dealing with that, too. Institute it across all minor-league levels and the game will get faster. 

 

[cannonball 1729]

 
 
Interleague play has also devalued the All-Star Game.
 
There was a time when people cared--whether or not "it counted." Ask Pete Rose or Ray Fosse. 
 

 
I think many things have devalued the All-Star Game:
 
- Free agency made the distinction between the leagues irrelevant.  It used to be the case that players would play in one league or the other for their whole career; now, a player will freely move from league to league, which makes it hard for players to engender strong feelings about either league.
 
- Americans don't care about exhibition games that don't directly lead to a championship anymore.  No one has the patience to watch things like the MLB Hall of Fame Game (discontinued in 2008) or the annual Red Sox vs. PawSox game in mid-April (discontinued in the mid-90s), especially if it puts their players at risk of an injury.  Heck, look at the hand-wringing over injuries in the World Baseball Classic; the only reason that teams (and American fans) were willing to go along with that is because MLB didn't give them a choice.
[SIZE=13.63636302948px]  As gaelgirl pointed out, there simply more stuff on TV (and the internet) now, so the idea of sitting around watching a game that doesn't lead to someone getting a championship doesn't really translate to today's TV landscape.  [/SIZE]
 
- The All-Star Game used to be the average fan's one chance to see all the great players in the league.  Now, you can see every player every day.
 
I don't think that you can pin the decline of the All-Star Game on interleague play.  I think this is simply the reality for exhibition-type games in the 21st century. 
 
Also, knowing Pete Rose, he probably had several thousand dollars riding on the outcome of that game.

 

[SumnerH]

20-30 years ago, the World Series averaged about double what the NBA finals averaged, in terms of viewers. More recently, the NBA gets about 10-20% more than MLB. We can disagree on cause, but baseball has experienced a spectacular decline in popularity in the last generation or so, and that has to be a concern moving forward as our children have no interest in the game.

 
 
1970-1979, baseball averaged 330,000 attendees per park.  In 2010, it was over 800,000.    http://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/2000-09attendance.htm
 
It's seen a decline in TV ratings as shares decline for everything across the board--unless you were a fractional sport like the NBA in the 1970s, you've seen huge TV ratings dropoffs as cable has proliferated.  That's true not just of sports but of sitcoms, news programs, dramas, and everything else on TV outside of the Superbowl (a unique event).  There's a reason that MASH's finale drew 125+ million viewers and nothing else has approached that, and it isn't that nobody watches TV anymore--you'll never, ever see a rating like that for a TV show in our lifetimes, even as TV viewership grows.  The more channels there are, the more the audience fragments.
 
Throughout that, baseball's had only a moderate decline in free television viewership--23 million or so WS viewers in 1980 to 15 million in 2010, as tv viewership fractures--and meanwhile has seen a huge spike (more than doubled) in paid attendance.  And it's managed to insulate itself from the changes in media by being the only major sport that draws about half of its income from ticket sales.  Compared to almost every other televised event, it's been a massive success, and certainly there's been a huge increase in paid viewership.  Claiming that it's a "spectacular decline in popularity" requires a pretty willful and pessimistic interpretation of events.

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

 

 
 
1970-1979, baseball averaged 330,000 attendees per park.  In 2010, it was over 800,000.    http://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/2000-09attendance.htm
 
It's seen a decline in TV ratings as shares decline for everything across the board--unless you were a fractional sport like the NBA in the 1970s, you've seen huge TV ratings dropoffs as cable has proliferated.  That's true not just of sports but of sitcoms, news programs, dramas, and everything else on TV outside of the Superbowl (a unique event).  There's a reason that MASH's finale drew 125+ million viewers and nothing else has approached that, and it isn't that nobody watches TV anymore--you'll never, ever see a rating like that for a TV show in our lifetimes, even as TV viewership grows.  The more channels there are, the more the audience fragments.
 
Throughout that, baseball's had only a moderate decline in free television viewership--23 million or so WS viewers in 1980 to 15 million in 2010, as tv viewership fractures--and meanwhile has seen a huge spike (more than doubled) in paid attendance.  And it's managed to insulate itself from the changes in media by being the only major sport that draws about half of its income from ticket sales.  Compared to almost every other televised event, it's been a massive success, and certainly there's been a huge increase in paid viewership.  Claiming that it's a "spectacular decline in popularity" requires a pretty willful and pessimistic interpretation of events.

 

42 million or so in 1980, not 23 million or so. And 121.6 million saw a minute or more of the MASH finale, a record that was broken five years ago by the Super Bowl, and broken again by the Super Bowl this year.

So ticket sales keep baseball going today, in part. So does television money. But what keeps it going tomorrow?

I think it needs to be a different product. And if they can rely on ticket sales to keep them going while they restructure the television product, that's great.

 

[timlinin8th]

I think baseball on television is a bad product. And wild cards and increased numbers of divisions have led to a mentality that the season is over once the local team is out of it. If meaningful games (for playoff contention) in September is some measure of popularity, then why isn't it equally bad, if not worse, when the best teams have wrapped up a playoff spot early on?

You don't tune out if the regular season is what it's all about. A marathon where the meaning comes from building something over the course of six months. I'd realign into four divisions, with only the winners playing a two-tier seven-game series.

So, realign into four divisions of 7 or 8 teams a piece with being the champion of the regular season as being the goal... What happens when 3 or 4 of the teams at the bottom of that ladder dont stand a realistic shot at climbing past the number of teams in front of them by the end of May? They'll have a marginal shot at best of obtaining this mythical regular season crown, and people will be tuned out before the ASB.

I said it before in my original post: this model gets SMOKED in todays environment.

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

What's changed, and I think the wild card is primarily responsible, is that it's no longer a national game. As long as people tune out when their team is no longer in contention, then no model works for baseball. Baseball works best as a journey, not a destination. What's special about it is the 162-game season.

 

[Max Power]

What's changed, and I think the wild card is primarily responsible, is that it's no longer a national game. As long as people tune out when their team is no longer in contention, then no model works for baseball. Baseball works best as a journey, not a destination. What's special about it is the 162-game season.

 
And the fans around the country agree, the 162 game season is special. They buy tickets and tune in to watch their team on that 162 game journey. You're claiming that they're going to stop doing that because they don't watch the games played after those 162 if their own team isn't playing in them. That claim is completely contradicted by the huge local TV contracts and tripling of average attendance since the divisional era started.
 
If you just want to look at the wild card era, average AL and NL attendance in 1993 were 2.3 million and 2.6 million respectively. In 2014 they were 2.3 million and 2.6 million, even with newer, smaller ballparks. I don't see anything in a downward trajectory except postseason TV ratings.

 

[geoduck no quahog]

Well I think ratings needs to be replaced by total viewership...if a once-a-week football game gets 1,000,000 viewers and 6 x week baseball game gets 200,000 viewers each day, then one sport has reached more (albeit not unique) customers. Also, baseball is a fantastic radio sport and I imagine there's a difference between football radio revenue and baseball radio revenue - but who knows.
 
I think there's also more subtlety to the season-lost tune-out between the sports. This is just a guess, but I don't see how a last-place Jets team retains popularity, even against a popular opponent - versus a shitty baseball team which still provides a nice distraction any day of the week, including facing interesting teams and having players competing for  individual awards.
 
Let's face it, football and baseball are completely different and (particularly playoff and championship) comparisons  are strained.
 
So what's the problem here? Are people upset at games lasting 3+ hours, or are they upset with the pace of the 3+ hour game? Or both? WTF - are we all ADHD?

 

[Sprowl]

So what's the problem here? Are people upset at games lasting 3+ hours, or are they upset with the pace of the 3+ hour game? Or both? WTF - are we all ADHD?

 
Speaking only for myself, I'm mildly upset at the decline in runs scored, but rather pleased with the 3+ hour games. The leisurely pace between pitches would be annoying if it weren't for the game thread.

 

[soxhop411]

One of the new  pace of game rules that they are testing out, which I hate, is the No-pitch IBB. We saw what happened during this years playoffs on an IBB.

 

[derekson]

The reason it isn't a national game anymore is that you can now watch all 162 games of your team if you so desire. It used to be that people watched a game or two per week when their team was on TV, and then the Saturday game of the week to see other teams. It was like football is now: only on a few days of the week so you watch it when it's on. With games on nearly every day during the season, it's easier to follow your team closely and get your fill of baseball and have little interest in seeing other teams, unless you are a truly hardcore baseball fan. Unless you want to cut the schedule to 30 games per team per season or cut the TV coverage to that level, you aren't going to go back to having a national following rather than team-specific fans.

 

[Rasputin]

What's changed, and I think the wild card is primarily responsible, is that it's no longer a national game. As long as people tune out when their team is no longer in contention, then no model works for baseball. Baseball works best as a journey, not a destination. What's special about it is the 162-game season.

 
This is just completely unfounded horse manure. Baseball is no longer the national pasttime, not because of the wild card, but because the country has changed, and football fits the character of the country better now. There are more sports available to watch. More things available to follow.
 
Football makes it pretty easy to follow. You pick college or pro, and you have one day each weekend to do all your errands and yardwork and whatever, and you spend the other day watching football. Then there's Mondays if you chose pro, and now Thursdays, but at most it's three days a week, and that's only if you feel the need to watch every single game you can, and really, who does that?
 
Do you really think baseball was still the national pasttime in 1994?
 
The notion that the wild card is why baseball isn't as popular as football is absurd.
 
And you know what? It's completely fine that baseball is less popular than football. Baseball doesn't have to be the most popular sport in America to be awesome, and it certainly doesn't have to be the most popular sport to avoid dying.
 
As has been pointed out multiple times, the only measure that's declining is national television ratings, and we know that's because it's a lot harder to eventify a best of seven series than it is a single game. We've had the world series go seven just three times this century, and just once since 2002.

 

[HriniakPosterChild]

As gaelgirl pointed out, there simply more stuff on TV (and the internet) now, so the idea of sitting around watching a game that doesn't lead to someone getting a championship doesn't really translate to today's TV landscape.  

Good point. We have P&G now.

Also, knowing Pete Rose, he probably had several thousand dollars riding on the outcome of that game.

Touché.

 

[Harry Hooper]

The reason it isn't a national game anymore is that you can now watch all 162 games of your team if you so desire. It used to be that people watched a game or two per week when their team was on TV, and then the Saturday game of the week to see other teams. It was like football is now: only on a few days of the week so you watch it when it's on. With games on nearly every day during the season, it's easier to follow your team closely and get your fill of baseball and have little interest in seeing other teams, unless you are a truly hardcore baseball fan. Unless you want to cut the schedule to 30 games per team per season or cut the TV coverage to that level, you aren't going to go back to having a national following rather than team-specific fans.

 
 
I was always puzzled when ESPN first started broadcasting MLB games that they didn't have a Thursday night game. Being a frequent travel day, this was the night when fans of a team that was travelling would be most likely to tune in a neutral game.

 

[Orel Miraculous]

We have this conversation literally every October. Every time the playoffs roll around, like clockwork, a contingent of Soshers who don't like baseball feel the need to talk about how much they don't like baseball. Invariably, instead of owning their own lack of interest, they just try to blame Bud Selig and call it a day.

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

If it makes some of you feel better to dismiss any criticism with straw men like that, knock yourself out. Is baseball making money? Absolutely. Are teams worth more than they were in 1994? Absolutely. Was baseball in perfect position to take advantage of the explosion of regional sports channels? Yes.

And that masks some fundamental problems with the game. Pacing is part of it. Incessant commercials are part of it. And a focus on your team only is also a big part of it, something that the wild card had a big part in creating. The bottom line is that your kids are far less likely to be baseball fans than you were. Which will translate to financial problems in the not-too-distant future.

I was a huge baseball fan. Even paid for Extra Innings for a while not that long ago. For the above reasons, I gradually lost interest in the game. I like the sport, but the product they put out today isn't very good.

 

[SumnerH]

And that masks some fundamental problems with the game. Pacing is part of it. Incessant commercials are part of it. 

 
FWIW, the NFL has slower pacing, less total minutes of action, more commercials, and more total commercial time.  
 
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703843804575534102219239786
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704281204575002852055561406

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

A lot of those commercials are clustered, though. You can skip halftime, and you can tune out for ten minutes or so if there's a score toward the end of the first or third quarter. There's much more strategy in football, which helps fill the downtime.

 

[Chemistry Schmemistry]

 

with a seeming "get off my lawn" attitude

 

It's easier to dismiss someone by name-calling than admit there's something to an argument. My point is fairly simple: the decline of World Series ratings tracks closely to the beginning of the wild card.

The decline of World Series ratings can not be explained by general declines in television viewing, because sports viewing is up, in general. The expansion of the playoffs, complete with welfare (in the form of wild card vouchers) for mediocre teams causes people to view baseball as a local sport. Which means they still watch local telecasts in most places (the Red Sox local ratings, for example, remain strong even when the team isn't as good), but they don't watch national games when their team isn't involved.

How else do you explain the facts?

 

[SumnerH]

   

It's easier to dismiss someone by name-calling than admit there's something to an argument. My point is fairly simple: the decline of World Series ratings tracks closely to the beginning of the wild card.
 

 
Yeah, I remember when they implemented the wild card back in 1978.

 

[johnmd20]

Almost every major playoff games ends at midnight on the east coast. If you are under the age of 14, and assuming you have parents, there is no chance for these kids to watch the biggest games of the year. So you're fostering a lack of interest because it's almost impossible to watch the games.
 
Contrast that to football, where every major game is played during the day and can be watched by all. Even the Super Bowl starts at 6:30pm east coast time. And the only time the biggest games go deep into the night is on Saturday.
 
So I think you are continually building a generation of fans who get addicted to watching football because they can. In my opinion, these late finishes certainly don't help the world series ratings.

 

[Orel Miraculous]

Almost every major playoff games ends at midnight on the east coast..

This statement is almost entirely incorrect. Precisely 1 of the World Series games has ended at midnight. Only 2 have ended later than 11:30. Every single NLCS game ended before midnight , with 3 of the five over by 11:30. Three of the four ALCS games ended before 11, with 2 of them over by 8.

 

[soxhop411]

Baseball Is Dying? Don't Be Stupid (Forbes)
 
(3 pages)

 

[HriniakPosterChild]

I didn't see this quote from Bill James, via Pos:
 

 
“You can’t REALLY address the problem unless you limit the ability to change pitchers. For more than 100 years, the number of pitching changes per game has gone up, and up, and up, and the number of MID-INNING pitching changes has gone up, and up, and up. It is still going up. If you carve 10, 15 minutes out of the game somehow, it isn’t going to make any difference at all because, in 10 years, there are going to be two or three more pitching changes in every game that will put us right back where we are now.
 
“What was that old Phyllis Diller joke? ‘I figure that cleaning the house when the kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk when it’s still snowing.’ It’s the same principle. You can’t solve this problem while it’s still getting worse.”

 

[canderson]

US TV viewership is down which I don't give a damn about, especially since people are comparing it to the time when Golden Girls had 20-25 market shares and Murder, She Wrote was in the 60s. Cosby was iirc between 35-40.

Has anyone seen viewership in emerging markets and Japan and Latin America?