Post by prisonerno6 on Nov 13, 2013 8:17:48 GMT -5
Chuck Todd is the host of MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown. You can follow him on Twitter @chucktodd.
There’s nothing that gets my back up more than when casual sports fans attack baseball because of its perceived “slowness.” As our collective national attention spans get shorter and shorter, it apparently is easier and easier to bash baseball for its lack of a game clock or a shot clock. And I’ll concede that, compared to other sports, the time it sometimes takes for a pitcher and a batter to engage can come across as “slow.” Of course, if folks were really comparing this issue of perceived “slowness,” they ought to do it from the point of view of actually ATTENDING baseball and football games. Why? They’d realize there is as much if not more downtime between football plays than pitches (at least when comparing to teams that actually still huddle up). But, again, I’ll concede, for television viewers, there is less “action” to follow.
That said, this perception problem is real and as a devoted baseball fan, I’d like to see more efforts to engage younger fans. There have been a lot articles about the potential age demographic issues facing baseball. The Wall Street Journal did an excellent piece a few weeks ago and their most important finding was this in regards to World Series viewership:
“The average World Series viewer this year is 54.4 years old, according to Nielsen, the media research firm. The trend line is heading north: The average age was 49.9 in 2009. Kids age 6 to 17 represented just 4.3% of the average audience for the American and National League Championship Series this year, compared with 7.4% a decade ago.”
By comparison, the Journal noted that both basketball and hockey had a higher percentage of youths watching their respective finals on TV than baseball. Bottom line, as all true baseball folks know, the statistics don’t lie. This is a problem for baseball. But the assets the game has as a business, in my opinion FAR out-number the so-called negatives. For instance, how many parents are having the conversation about baseball and safety these days? Compare that to the conversations I have with my fellow little league moms and dads when it comes to football. (For the record, I’m still leaning toward letting my son play football but not until he’s 12 but the Tony Dorsett news shook me more than anything I’ve heard on this topic, but I digress). Baseball also has a few other advantages when it comes to future demographic trends:
1) the growth of the Hispanic population in this country; (I assume readers of all things Gammons don’t need a Latin baseball history lesson).
2) baseball fans in general are a LOT less rowdy than football fans. Bottom line: baseball is and always has been more family friendly.
3) baseball’s history is more relevant to the present than any other sport. Now that the steroids era is MOSTLY over, that’s more true today than it has ever been.
And it is this third aspect to baseball that I want to focus on because ultimately, baseball’s future is in the hands of its fans. We have the obligation to pass on the love. It is the ultimate “pay it forward” sport. If interest in baseball is fading, I’d start by asking whether fans are doing enough to pass on their love of the game. I am an avid baseball fan thanks almost solely to my father. My best memories with him all revolve around baseball. He shaped my love of sports overall, football and baseball in particular, but it was the little things he did with baseball that helped create my love for the game. We did some of predictable things fathers and sons do and a few unpredictable. We attended spring training games nearly every year in Vero Beach (yes, I’m a devoted Dodger fan; still miss Dodgertown). Growing up in Miami in the ‘70s and ‘80s meant no Major League Baseball locally, so that meant the best baseball being played locally was in Coral Gables at “Mark Light Stadium” – home of the Miami Hurricanes (national champs in 1982 and 1985!) The games were free after the third inning (helpful to my parents who were on a tight budget). We also did an annual car trip in August to Atlanta to catch the Dodgers and the Braves. It seemed the two teams ALWAYS played in August, just before school started, so the timing was perfect. (My best memory of one of those games, Lasorda forcing Braves pitcher Pasqual Perez to bury his neck chains because they were distracting his batters; it was vintage Lasorda outrage).
In 1982, apparently my father read about this crazy idea of “Rotisserie Baseball”; At the time, I wasn’t aware of roto, but he decided he and I should develop the “Todd Banana League”; I still have the yellow legal pad of paper that he wrote the rules on (National League only btw); I thought my dad was some baseball game creating genius (only later on did I realize, he was simply copying a concept that a bunch of baseball fanatics invented in New York). Every Sunday that year and the next 3, we dutifully used the Sunday Miami Herald sports section to update our weekly totals. It was only in the Sunday Herald that full statistics for all players ran. Ah the good old days of having to wait a WEEK for new baseball stats!
This is all a round-a-bout way for me to thank my late father for giving me such a passion for baseball. I have since taken that passion and done my best to pass it on to my son and daughter. Thursday is the 25th anniversary of my dad’s death. And 25 years ago, October of 1988, of course, was a special month and year for Dodger fans; I watched many of those Dodger-A’s World Series games in my dad’s hospital room; I don’t know if he truly followed the series; he had a bunch of tubes in him and couldn’t talk; But he could write and he would write “Go Dodgers” or “Orel is great.” We didn’t see the Kirk Gibson Homerun together (the only game we didn’t watch together that series) but for me, every time I see the homerun, I immediately think of dad and that hospital room.
As the Dodgers were making their run this year in the playoffs, I kept thinking of that series 25 years ago and, of course, my father. Personally, I can’t believe he’s been dead longer than I knew him alive. My memory of him is of a slightly heavyset and bearded 39 year old man. And the memory is very fresh; it is not 25 years old in my head. There’s no fade, no yellowing like a photograph fades.
But now these memories are not just all sad, they are becoming more positive, and it’s all thanks to baseball. And it’s all thanks to passing on my love for baseball to my kids. Or more, correctly, passing on my dad’s love for baseball to the grandkids he never met. I think both of them are already devoted fans (they even collect baseball cards!); if something happened to me tomorrow, I think they’d know to pass on their love of baseball (and college football) to their kids. And they would be doing the job all baseball fans should be doing today, passing on the love of this game. Baseball is one of the best distractions in my life and it’s now one of the great positive distractions in kids’ lives. While Major League Baseball could always do a better job connecting with younger fans, I also believe baseball fans should have the patience to pass on their love of the game to the next generation. It doesn’t need a “pitch clock” or a “batter’s box clock”; it just needs smart fans to pass on their love and knowledge of the game.
There’s nothing that gets my back up more than when casual sports fans attack baseball because of its perceived “slowness.” As our collective national attention spans get shorter and shorter, it apparently is easier and easier to bash baseball for its lack of a game clock or a shot clock. And I’ll concede that, compared to other sports, the time it sometimes takes for a pitcher and a batter to engage can come across as “slow.” Of course, if folks were really comparing this issue of perceived “slowness,” they ought to do it from the point of view of actually ATTENDING baseball and football games. Why? They’d realize there is as much if not more downtime between football plays than pitches (at least when comparing to teams that actually still huddle up). But, again, I’ll concede, for television viewers, there is less “action” to follow.
That said, this perception problem is real and as a devoted baseball fan, I’d like to see more efforts to engage younger fans. There have been a lot articles about the potential age demographic issues facing baseball. The Wall Street Journal did an excellent piece a few weeks ago and their most important finding was this in regards to World Series viewership:
“The average World Series viewer this year is 54.4 years old, according to Nielsen, the media research firm. The trend line is heading north: The average age was 49.9 in 2009. Kids age 6 to 17 represented just 4.3% of the average audience for the American and National League Championship Series this year, compared with 7.4% a decade ago.”
By comparison, the Journal noted that both basketball and hockey had a higher percentage of youths watching their respective finals on TV than baseball. Bottom line, as all true baseball folks know, the statistics don’t lie. This is a problem for baseball. But the assets the game has as a business, in my opinion FAR out-number the so-called negatives. For instance, how many parents are having the conversation about baseball and safety these days? Compare that to the conversations I have with my fellow little league moms and dads when it comes to football. (For the record, I’m still leaning toward letting my son play football but not until he’s 12 but the Tony Dorsett news shook me more than anything I’ve heard on this topic, but I digress). Baseball also has a few other advantages when it comes to future demographic trends:
1) the growth of the Hispanic population in this country; (I assume readers of all things Gammons don’t need a Latin baseball history lesson).
2) baseball fans in general are a LOT less rowdy than football fans. Bottom line: baseball is and always has been more family friendly.
3) baseball’s history is more relevant to the present than any other sport. Now that the steroids era is MOSTLY over, that’s more true today than it has ever been.
And it is this third aspect to baseball that I want to focus on because ultimately, baseball’s future is in the hands of its fans. We have the obligation to pass on the love. It is the ultimate “pay it forward” sport. If interest in baseball is fading, I’d start by asking whether fans are doing enough to pass on their love of the game. I am an avid baseball fan thanks almost solely to my father. My best memories with him all revolve around baseball. He shaped my love of sports overall, football and baseball in particular, but it was the little things he did with baseball that helped create my love for the game. We did some of predictable things fathers and sons do and a few unpredictable. We attended spring training games nearly every year in Vero Beach (yes, I’m a devoted Dodger fan; still miss Dodgertown). Growing up in Miami in the ‘70s and ‘80s meant no Major League Baseball locally, so that meant the best baseball being played locally was in Coral Gables at “Mark Light Stadium” – home of the Miami Hurricanes (national champs in 1982 and 1985!) The games were free after the third inning (helpful to my parents who were on a tight budget). We also did an annual car trip in August to Atlanta to catch the Dodgers and the Braves. It seemed the two teams ALWAYS played in August, just before school started, so the timing was perfect. (My best memory of one of those games, Lasorda forcing Braves pitcher Pasqual Perez to bury his neck chains because they were distracting his batters; it was vintage Lasorda outrage).
In 1982, apparently my father read about this crazy idea of “Rotisserie Baseball”; At the time, I wasn’t aware of roto, but he decided he and I should develop the “Todd Banana League”; I still have the yellow legal pad of paper that he wrote the rules on (National League only btw); I thought my dad was some baseball game creating genius (only later on did I realize, he was simply copying a concept that a bunch of baseball fanatics invented in New York). Every Sunday that year and the next 3, we dutifully used the Sunday Miami Herald sports section to update our weekly totals. It was only in the Sunday Herald that full statistics for all players ran. Ah the good old days of having to wait a WEEK for new baseball stats!
This is all a round-a-bout way for me to thank my late father for giving me such a passion for baseball. I have since taken that passion and done my best to pass it on to my son and daughter. Thursday is the 25th anniversary of my dad’s death. And 25 years ago, October of 1988, of course, was a special month and year for Dodger fans; I watched many of those Dodger-A’s World Series games in my dad’s hospital room; I don’t know if he truly followed the series; he had a bunch of tubes in him and couldn’t talk; But he could write and he would write “Go Dodgers” or “Orel is great.” We didn’t see the Kirk Gibson Homerun together (the only game we didn’t watch together that series) but for me, every time I see the homerun, I immediately think of dad and that hospital room.
As the Dodgers were making their run this year in the playoffs, I kept thinking of that series 25 years ago and, of course, my father. Personally, I can’t believe he’s been dead longer than I knew him alive. My memory of him is of a slightly heavyset and bearded 39 year old man. And the memory is very fresh; it is not 25 years old in my head. There’s no fade, no yellowing like a photograph fades.
But now these memories are not just all sad, they are becoming more positive, and it’s all thanks to baseball. And it’s all thanks to passing on my love for baseball to my kids. Or more, correctly, passing on my dad’s love for baseball to the grandkids he never met. I think both of them are already devoted fans (they even collect baseball cards!); if something happened to me tomorrow, I think they’d know to pass on their love of baseball (and college football) to their kids. And they would be doing the job all baseball fans should be doing today, passing on the love of this game. Baseball is one of the best distractions in my life and it’s now one of the great positive distractions in kids’ lives. While Major League Baseball could always do a better job connecting with younger fans, I also believe baseball fans should have the patience to pass on their love of the game to the next generation. It doesn’t need a “pitch clock” or a “batter’s box clock”; it just needs smart fans to pass on their love and knowledge of the game.
