Pages

Thursday, October 18, 2007

The Stupidity of Sports

...scheduling, that is. (What, did you really think I'd write about the stupidity of sports?!) I couldn't agree more with this article, which details how baseball has really blown up its own fan base in the quest for the almighty dollar - a way of doing business that has come back to hurt them, or will, when FOX et al are no longer willing to pay outrageous prices to show games.
Along the way, the game lost a generation who couldn't stay up at night. In the chase for the almighty dollar, baseball gave up its youngest fans.

No need to look any further than the second game of the NL championship series for proof. The game didn't begin until after 10 p.m. ET and by the time it mercifully ended nearly five hours later, people not only had fallen asleep at the game but some early risers had awakened to it.

It's only logical that the later a game goes, the fewer the people watching. And the longer a game takes to be played, the more people will get bored watching it. It's a pretty simple equation: Late and long is killing the postseason.

You would think someday baseball folks would figure it out.
It's pathetic. One person just told me that they couldn't help but enjoy watching their daughter be so elated when Damon hit that HR in Game 3 of the ALDS... only to have her go to sleep soon after. And she certainly couldn't watch Game 4.

As a note, basketball is the worst offender, dragging the postseason out for months on end. One of the reasons the NCAA tournament is so popular is that it happens awfully fast - 3 weekend to turn 65 teams into 1 champion. The NBA can't finish a single series in that time period. The NFL has it the best, where their games are already a week apart; as it is, they get criticized for the week extra between the Conference Championships and the Super Bowl, though I don't think those are all that bad.

3 comments:

  1. The main problem is having the West Coast playoff games on a primetime slot Pacific Time, in other words late at night on the East Coast or midwest, where the bigger markets are. A simple solution would be to have all West Coast games starting at 4:05.
    This wouldn't help cut down the actual game time. It would only make the ending time earlier. To cut down on the 4 hour games, they need to shorten the commercials and not have every pitch seem like its the most important pitch ever by having the pitcher get five sequences of signs from the catcher before he steps off the rubber to check the runner at first.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My 8 year old who can't stay up for all the games is, nonetheless, the most avid baseball fan in the family.

    A few years ago, his brothers were the big fans. (My sons who are fans are all Yankees fans adopting their mother's minhag.) We'd send them to bed before it got too late, but we had a policy of waking them for the end of the game.

    So in 2001 with the Yankees holding a 1 run lead and Mariano Rivera on the mound we woke up our (then) 7 year old to watch the Yankees close out the series once again.

    Only it didn't happen like that. Luis Gonzales hit that bases loaded broken bat bloop and Arizona went on to win. He was hysterical. (We didn't understand why he was so upset until later. A nemesis of his in school was expected to be quite merciless in berating him for the Yankee loss.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. they couldn't help but enjoy watching their daughter be so elated when Damon hit that HR in Game 3 of the ALDS... only to have her go to sleep soon after. And she certainly couldn't watch Game 4.
    ---------
    WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!
    I'll not stand for this, somebody alert the athourities. Sending your child to bed in the midle of a playoff game...and refusing Game 4!!!
    Child abuse, that's what this is. Where's that hotline number...

    ReplyDelete