Jeff Passan tells us that baseball is having an attendance problem:
Compared to last season at this juncture, the Boston Red Sox are down about 2,500 fans a game. For the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals, it’s nearly 5,000. The Cleveland Indians’ average crowd has dropped more than 5,000, the Texas Rangers’ more than 7,000 and the Pittsburgh Pirates more than 7,500. The Toronto Blue Jays, Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals each are in the 8,000-fan range, and the Miami Marlins are pushing 10,000. The most severe is the Baltimore Orioles, who have played six games at home and are at almost 16,000 fewer per.
So far we've had an awful spring in the northeast.
[You had two snow storms each of 6+ inches-Ed] We just had a 12 hour torrential downpour here, great for the new lawn, and we only had to sacrifice one daughter to the god Kek to get it. Praise Kek!
Readers in other parts of this great land should note that in the northeast April is usually dank, wet, cold, windy. Real spring doesn't come around till May. Of course for TV money baseball has all these night games on ESPN featuring, say, the Yankees and Red Sox. Those games are as cold and unpleasant as they look.
There's a reason baseball used to start in mid-April. Now the geniuses in baseball are starting the season in late March and playing it all the way to November. Early October in these parts is wonderful. The air is dry and crisp usually about 50 degrees... [50! holy...] That's Fahrenheit, not your stupid Celsius. Why don't you got put on your short shorts and kick a 'futball' around? We bet Renaldo shaves his legs.
Anyhoo, early October is wonderful, but with this November World Series baseball is really pushing its' luck. We had hoped we'd see some common sense with new commish Rob Manford. So far not so good.
American football, under attack from critics in recent years, has lost some of its popularity but is still the champion of U.S. spectator sports -- picked by 37% of U.S. adults as their favorite sport to watch. The next-most-popular sports are basketball, favored by 11%, and baseball, favored by 9%.
None of this is really surprising. But there is this:
The 9% of Americans who mention baseball as their favorite sport to watch is the lowest percentage for the sport since Gallup first asked the question in 1937. Americans named baseball as the most popular sport in 1948 and 1960, but football claimed the top spot in 1972 and has been the public's favorite ever since.
Soccer now nearly matches baseball's popularity. Seven percent say it is their favorite sport to watch, the highest that sport has registered to date. Only once before have at least 7% of Americans named a sport other than football, basketball or baseball as their favorite -- and that was auto racing in 1997. (Auto racing is now down to 2% of mentions.)
That's right, Soccer is now almost as popular in America as baseball. We've written of this before. Baseball has no one to blame for its' decline but itself. During football's rise in the 60's and 70's baseball stood complacent and pat, resting on the laurels of Ruth, Mantle, Mays, etc... Time is now a yuuge problem. A baseball game takes three hours. A soccer match two hours, if that. Baseball is slowed by batters stepping in and out of the box, pitchers wondering around the mound, mound conferences between pitcher and catchers, TV time outs, a half dozen pitching changes.... The games cane be hard to sit through.
Baseball shifted to a night based schedule from which it's never come back. The last day world series game was 1987. We remember watching it. Because of a ridiculous 8:37 start, how many kids saw this?
...and a few innings later:
...and the next night, this:
'I have ever...scene anything...like it....' said a stunned Tim McCarver. Neither did millions of kids because those shots came at the 11 and 12 o'clock hours. And they wonder why Soccer is threatening baseball.
Come on, foreign reader(s) watch the clips. They're baseball.
