Monday, January 07, 2013
Poll finds baseball second-most popular American sport
(www.cbssports.com)
posted on January 07, 2013 at 05:44 PM by Gamingboy to doom and gloom, popularity, statistics
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157 comment(s)
Of the adults polled, 34 percent said pro football was their favorite sport, not surprisingly making it the top dog in American sports. Actually, I’m surprised the gap wasn’t wider. Baseball checked in at No. 2 with 16 percent of the vote, followed by college football (11 percent), auto racing (eight percent), men’s pro basketball (seven percent), hockey (five percent) and men’s college basketball (three percent).
Now, I found the headline on adage.com a bit odd. It was “Look out, baseball, college football is hot on your cleats.” I found it odd because, last year, baseball and college football were tied for second at 13 percent each. So baseball gained three percentage points, college football lost two and it’s “look out, baseball?”
I was unaware the College Football was a sport. I thought it was a playing level of a sport.
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1 2 3 4 >Baiting BTFers: a sport.
Only if shooting fish in a barrel is also a sport.
As a young man, I would have checked the baseball box. Sadly I would either check hockey or college football now depending on what time of year I was asked.
#1: You go and wrestle with a steering wheel for two hours while being subjected to several G's of force several times per lap, and get back to us; hell, go and ride a high-speed rollercoaster with all of the loops and curves you want for 2 hours, if you can. There's a reason there aren't any fat race car drivers (at least anymore).
#2: I fail to see any ultimate distinction between sports which use various physical implements (hockey, baseball), and those which use more complicated machines (bicycling, motor sports), and hell those which use none at all (soccer)-even a leg is a machine in a way. Point is they all require the user to know the laws of physics intimately well in order to excel in his chosen field. Auto racers simply utilize extensions of their own bodies in the course of their competitions.
We've had more than our fair share of idiotic threads over the years, but I think the "That's Not a Sport" ones are the idiotickest.
There is a difference between an object and a machine. A bat/stick is an object because there are no moving parts. The bikes having moving parts and can provide results without the person providing any input after a point (bike keeps rolling even if rider stops pedalling...a bat just lies on the ground if the batter does nothing). Cars are complicated pieces of machinery with engines and electronics.
It's part of the human body. You've taken your analogy and driven it off a cliff at this point.
I think by definition it is a sport(but so is poker, and pok-e-mon I believe) but for me, it's not a real sport.
I more or less define a sport as a direct competition between two or more sides, in which the participants are expected to give full physical effort for a brief period of time during the event, in which scoring is not strictly based upon a judge and who's primary method of locomotion is provided by the participants effort.(I.E...bike racing is a sport, nascar is not)
I always find it funny when people get upset if you call their preferred event not a sport. I'm a bowler, and bowling is not a sport.(neither is golf) It's not an insult, it's just what it is. It's like saying Star Wars is not hard science fiction.
I also accept that some sports have evolved to where they don't fall under these definitions, but the point is that at it's heart they match. Boxing might be decided by a judge frequently, but at the heart of the matter, the winner is the guy who is standing at the end of the match.
It's looks like someone watched a single game of baseball 10 years ago while drunk, and then tried to recreate it based on memory.
Being taxing or tough doesn't make it a sport.
Pesapallo - finish Baseball
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesäpallo
Or at least follow two/three sports.
The ad age article mentions an ESPN poll that asked about 2nd favorite sports, whether people consider them a fan of a league, etc. That might be more interesting.
A baseball keeps flying (for a little while) after you hit it. A javelin keeps flying (for a little while) after you throw it. A bike is certainly a more complicated machine than a javelin or a baseball bat, but it only responds to the forces you apply to it.
I like it, especially that they make the umpires wear Harlequin outfits. They should do that with the MLB umps. Might take a little starch out of their attitudes.
Of course not. Bowling and golf are games, just like baseball. Football is a sport, because it involves actually trying to injure your opponent to win. So is hockey, MMF, or MMA or whatever it calls itself, as well as lacrosse and boxing. There are lots of others, but those are the first that come to mind.
Disagree on the baseball classification. Sport doesn't mean you try to injure your opposition, at least to me. 100m dash is a sport. There is no attempt to injure in racing.
I think that people claiming to like college basketball are what I would call sport hipsters. They vocally claim their support of something even though it's clearly less popular, and come up with silly crap like "better pure game"..while ignoring the obvious "massively lower quality of participants".
It wasn't an analogy-it was showing how these activities are more similar than the splitters and dichotomists amongst us like to think. A lot of technology goes into an athletic shoe too.
Still waiting for your Perfectly Consistent Definition which includes most everything within the Sport umbrella, but excludes motor sport...
Primary mode of transportation is powered by the individual..
Nascar, horse racing is not a sport, by my opinion. By textbook definition ####### chess is a sport.
So... rollercoaster riding is a sport?
Who cares about the shoe... can you do a race without a shoe? The high end equipment doesn't matter. You can have a 100m dash with no shoes. You can't have a car race with no car. There are certain equipment necessary to play a sport of course, but it doesn't need to be high quality. At it's core a foot race is two people running against each other, winner crosses the finish line. Baseball is a group of people playing a game within certain rules, winner is the team with the most runs at the designated finish. You need a bat, and a ball((you don't even need bases, you can draw circles in the ground and it's good enough) The determining factor, for me to call it a sport is that the participants are providing the power/energy for the action. Car racing is not. Car racing is a guy getting in a car and driving against others. The participants aren't providing the energy for the locomotion, they aren't ever giving full physical effort for even a few seconds. Horse racing is the same thing, it's a sport for the horses, but not for the jockeys.
No clue, but that is the advantage of a board with 10 or more active threads, you can post in the threads you want to participate in, and ignore the ones you don't.
I follow both college and NBA basketball, and you're forgetting one thing: the early rounds of the NBA playoffs are long and boring, and even the Conference Finals and Finals can be complete duds. March Madness is perhaps the third best sporting event in existence behind the Olympics and the World Cup.
ETA: Add in the relative pointlessness of the NBA regular season, and the fact that the quality of play is significantly higher gets taken away by the tedium of the season and early playoffs.
The division of the rights to "s" was a subsection of the Treaty of Ghent.
1. Baseball
<sizable gap>
2. College basketball - I acknowledge the quality level is drastically inferior and that many of the "reasons" people give for liking CBB more than NBA are just bullsh!t, but aesthetically I enjoy college basketball much more. I like the shorter season and March Madness is IMO the best two weeks of sports there is by far.
<bigger gap>
3. NFL - It only ranks ahead of the next two because I "belong" to a specific team (I don't really have a particular NBA or NCAAF team that I live and die with). Aside from my particular favorite team, I have less interest in random NFL games than I do game in the following two leagues.
4. NBA - It used to rank higher for me and maybe will still in the future. I just haven't been that interested in it in the last decade, but I won't claim that the reason for this is anything negative about the NBA. It's just me.
5. College football - There isn't much separating 3/4/5 here, and they might change in their rankings in any given year. I follow all three fairly closely, but not nearly as closely as 1 and 2.
<very large gap>
6. Golf - I just started playing golf in earnest in the last couple years, and as such my interest in the professional tour has increased. I now make a point to watch (at least the final round) of major tournaments (not necessarily just THE majors) whereas before I may have only watched them if I found myself bored and in front of the TV.
7. NASCAR - I got into a fantasy NASCAR league a couple years ago at the behest of a couple friends, and after watching several races I started to "get it". It's an exciting sport, but has many flaws.
<very large gap>
8. Soccer -- I kinda want to get into it more, but truthfully, I I need to devote less of my time and energy to following sports, not more, so I think I'll stick with just paying close attention every four years.
<gap>
9. Olympics -- Kinda fun every four years (or every two years I guess), but I don't really get that into it.
10. Tennis -- I'll sit down and watch a Grand Slam final if it is a particularly intriguing matchup.
Also considered: College baseball (I'd like to try to get into it), boxing, horse racing.
NOT considered: Hockey, MMA
It is for the horse.
I'm perfectly fine with that, and even though I don't like basketball in the slightest, I understand the appeal of March Madness and think that if I liked basketball at all, that it would be more appealing to me than NBA basketball. Mind you I find college basketball regular season to be one of the worse tv experiences imaginable, if you get the unfortunate broadcast of a ranked team versus a justly deserved non-ranked team. (The game becomes more about time management instead of actually playing the game....what could be a fun 120-40 blow out instead turns into a tedious 67-55 game....just like world cup soccer, I just can't find enjoyment in watching a sport in which the goal is more about not losing, than it is about trying to win.)
Someone on my facebook just posted "Fantasy football, Dungeons and Dragons for jocks" meme... Just thought that was funny, and what I kinda view fantasy sports nowadays. Of course fantasy sports are great for getting people interested in a sport, it's done a world of good in adding to the cross sex appeal of the NFL. I imagine that Nascar is also enjoying a similar bump as it's a sport that allows the fantasy fans to jump in and pay attention to it once a week.
Follow each week and in the offseason closely, watch a lot of regular season games, watch most of the playoffs regardless of whether my team's in it, OR follow obsessively when it's on:
1) MLB
2) NFL
3) Summer Olympics
4) Winter Olympics
Follow during the season well enough to know how the teams are doing, watch some regular season games, watch some postseason games, more if my teams are in it OR follow obsessively when it's on but only be somewhat aware of the qualifiers:
5) World Cup Soccer
6) World Baseball Classic
7) NCAA Men's Basketball
8) NHL (though I'm done with the Bruins until their jackass owner croaks it, go Sabres!)
Follow during the season well enough to know who's good and who's terrible, seldom watch games in season, watch some postseason games, mainly if my teams are competitive:
9) NBA
10) NCAA Football
11) NCAA Women's basketball
12) Premier League
Follow only passingly:
13) NCAA Hockey
14) MMA
15) Other European soccer leagues
Basketball is deadly dull. Either every game is basically a statistical tie or it's obvious who's going to win after 10 minutes. Any strategy is utterly undetectable.
2) MMA. I hate the way the UFC is run and that factor alone has severely diminished my interest in MMA as a whole, but it's still a very entertaining sport to watch. I miss the defunct Japanese PRIDE promotion like crazy.
3) Old boxing. Can't support the modern game given the knowledge of the awful things being done to these athletes' brains, but I can watch footage of the long-retired with a clear conscience.
4) Nothing. Gotta get out of the basement on occasion.
2. NFL playoffs with the kind of matchups we've been getting recently, with no Florida teams and as many original NFL and AFL franchises as possible
3. Baseball playoffs as long as the Yankees, Orioles or Nats are in it, and preferably without the Braves
4. NCAA basketball Sweet Sixteen through the championship game, but moves up to # 2 if Carolina is in the final four
5. Pool players I know personally playing in national or regional tournaments via livestreaming
6. NBA playoffs if the Celtics or an interesting backup team are in it
7. Michigan-Ohio State, Alabama-Georgia, Alabama-Florida, Army-Navy or Yale-Harvard football, and any BCS championship game that doesn't crap all over the place like tonight's (apologies if Notre Dame ever made a game of it)
8. The Masters or U.S. Open, but only with Tiger Woods in contention on the last day
9. coke to YR for reminding me of vintage boxing matches like Marciano-Walcott and Louis-Conn I
10. Re-runs of classic past games and matches in any of the above sports
Can't think of any others. Definitely no Olympics-type sports or auto racing.
MLB, NHL
Watch games semi-regularly (mostly playoffs)
NCAA Basketball, NFL
Watch games intermittently (mostly highlights)
International soccer (EPL, World Cup, Champions League)
Rarely watch (major tournaments only)
PGA, Summer Olympics evnets, Winter Olympics events, junior hockey
Pay attention to highlights only, know the major stars
NBA, MMA, NCAA football
Barely know anything about, maybe one name or two I recognize
Boxing, NASCAR
MLB (Blue Jays, Tigers, Red Sox, Yankees)
NHL (Leafs, Red Wings)
NBA (Raptors)
NFL (Bills)
MLS (Toronto FC)
Championship League (Charlton Athletic FC)
Canadian Junior Hockey (Ottawa 67s, London Knights, Toronto Marlboros*)
NCAA basketball (numerous teams for rounds 2/3 in March Madness)
NCAA football (Michigan Wolverines)
AHL (Toronto Roadrunners*)
AAA baseball (Ottawa Lynx*)
Frontier League baseball (London Monarchs*)
CIS football (Waterloo)
CIS basketball (Waterloo)
CIS hockey (Waterloo)
NASL (Blizzard*)
* defunct teams
#1: You go and wrestle with a rook for two hours while being subjected to en prise traps and Alehkine's Gun several times per contest, and get back to us; hell, go and watch a blitz chess match with all of the loops and curves you want for 2 hours, if you can. There's a reason there aren't any skinny chess players (at least anymore).
#2: I fail to see any ultimate distinction between sports which use complicated machines (bicycling, motor sports), and those which use stiff boards and pieces (chess, checkers, go), and hell those which use none at all (soccer)-even a goalie is a king in a way. Point is they all require the user to know the laws of mathematics intimately well in order to excel in his chosen field. Chess players simply utilize the blessings of Caïssa in the course of their competitions.
Someone has never watched the unfortunate broadcast of two unjustly non-ranked teams -- typically major conference bottom-dwellers.
They're different because a fairly significant portion of the population considers each one to be their favorite sport, I suppose. The number of people who would say that minor-league baseball is their favorite sport is probably quite low. As opposed to college football...
I wonder about the methodology of the study. Did they give people a multiple choice set of options? Did they just ask open-ended questions?
And while you're at it, tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes.
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