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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Monday, October 17, 2011
I guess the same reason nobody cares about the Calico Lassie vs Tressy nude doll fistimuffs in my basement anymore.
I walk around the streets of New York and nobody cares about the World Series.
It is sad to see, because if you love baseball, you have to love this series. I know the Mets had a rotten year and the Yankees made a quick exit in the first round but this Texas/St. Louis series has some juice. It is a shame New Yorkers don’t see it.
You know we all say the New York baseball fan is smarter and more perceptive than any other fans in the country, but if the truth be told we’re as provincial as any of those other fans. When our baseball teams are out, we shut down and I guess what that means is we are really not baseball fans.
~bingfuckino~
The NY football fan still had interest in the Super Bowl after the Jets were bumped by the Steelers and the NY NBA fans were certainly mesmerized by Heat/Mavericks last year, but if we don’t see Yanks, Mets or Phils or Red Sox (only because we hate those last two teams) we shut down.
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1. Joey B. has ignited his October #Natitude Posted: October 17, 2011 at 08:46 PM (#3966564)I predict respectable, if not great numbers. The Cardinals have one of the largest regional fanbases in the sport, and Texas is a pretty big state. Ratings might be somewhat soft in the northeast and California, but I think they'll be pretty solid in most the rest of the country.
If your city's team is not in the Super Bowl, you'll still care about it, because it's the Super Bowl.
If your city's team is not in a pre-Super Bowl NFL playoff game, you probably won't care all that much about it.
If your city's team is not in the NBA Finals, you'll still care about it if one of the teams has an interesting, highly hyped story to follow, such as the '90s Bulls or the current Heat.
Otherwise, you probably won't care all that much about it.
MLB similar to NBA.
No one ever cares about hockey.
These would seem to be quite universal regardless of what city you're talking about.
it's really gonna suck if they win this thing. best case scenario is them losing the series in game 6 because of a 5 reliever, 45 minute, 6 run 8th inning
1...2...3.4.5
Anyway, I did an informal market survey last night. I went for jog down the strand (Manhattan-Hermosa Beach) around 6 PM local and counted the number of TVs tuned into the NFL game (Bears-Vikings blowout) versus the MLB game (Cards-Brewers blowout). Seemed like an fair competition, all the teams from the Midwest, games were not very competitive. And to be clear, it was after dusk and most folks have big windows facing the ocean making it easy to see what they are watching while just running by.
Final tally: NFL 16, MLB 4, Ducks hockey 3, unidentified soccer game 2.
Baseball not doing real well with this particular group of high disposal income (to put it mildly) folks.
Judging by the ongoing races at BTF to see who can be the most outraged by the existence the Wild Card or the least interested in the World Series, I would propose that everybody is insufferable on this, fans and media alike.
To steal a quote from Kevin Smith, the baseball community doesn't celebrate their sport -- they mourn it.
CFB won't stand for this crap!
I'd be happy with either team losing under these circumstances. The potential for managerial second-guessing in this series is bait enough for me.
St. Louis can come back with some JJ Cale if they choose to diss Washington in an equivalent fashion.
I agree that it is more of a national sport but I think that is eroding. I think the Super Bowl will be the Super Bowl and the playoffs will be the playoffs for a while but MNF and SNF does show a trend that the nation won't simply watch football to watch football.
-Hermosa Beach's own BLACK FLAG
Judging by the ongoing races at BTF to see who can be the most outraged by the existence the Wild Card or the least interested in the World Series, I would propose that everybody is insufferable on this, fans and media alike.
I've seen far more whining about the upcoming WS matchup here than I've seen in the media. The media seem to be fascinated with the emergence of the Rangers as the new AL powerhouse and with LaRussa's masterminding of his pitching during the LCS, and I've seen little in the way of mourning for the fate of the Yankees or the Phillies, not to mention the laughable Red Sox.
The real BS is the idea that "the media" speak in some sort of a unified voice, but when you've got a site that specializes in pinata posting (not that there's anything wrong with that), it's not hard to see where people get that idea.
TMI Repoz.
Baseball wasn't always a regional sport. I consider this to be one of the greatest failures of the Selig era. There was once a time when the World Series was a big deal, and it wasn't long ago (think 20 years).
BLACK FLAG
Creepy crawl the Starwood! Brothers and Sisters, you MUST creepy crawl the Starwood! The Starwood must be creepy crawled!
Well, 21 years ago was kind of a crappy WS ratings wise. Game 6's and 7's tend to be a big deal.
The ratings even in the 80's wasn't really all that hot.
Right -- I forgot about how the 1980 World Series wasn't the highest rated Series of all time.
Somebody needs to repost World Series ratings numbers from the 70s, 80s and 90s, so we at least have some actual data to argue about.
These teams certainly have enough star power between them, in Pujols, Holliday, Carpenter, Young, Beltre, Hamilton, and Cruz. So there's at least the potential for some great individual performances.
Dan, baseball's regionalization began with the rise of local cable networks, which let local fans watch all of their team's games instead of a relative handful. And the weakening of baseball's regionalization almost perfectly corresponds to the rise of national cable networks and ExtraInnings, which let fans watch a steadily increasing diet of out-of-area "premium" games as an escape from their mediocre home market teams. Together these phenomena created the TV version of traveling fans.
But the real "decline" of the World Series is mostly just a case of other sports starting to compete with baseball on a more systemic and intelligent level, beginning with the NFL in the late 50's and then spreading to college basketball in the mid-70's, the NBA in the Dr. J / Bird / Magic / Jordan era, and eventually countless other minor sports with the advent of cable. It's easy to dominate the sports pages as baseball did for 50 years when the only competition was college football for a few overlapping weeks, and when businesses and schools didn't object to radios being turned on to the World Series in the background. It's not so easy when all that monopoly time gradually comes to a halt.
But, even in the pre-cable era, wouldn't high ratings be indicitive of the national popularity of the World Series, as opposed to the current regional nature of the event? I'm not talking about comparing ratings from two eras directly (though we should do that when we claim that nobody watched the 1990 World Series) -- I'm talking about whether the World Series was seen more as a national or local event in the pre-Selig era.
Football has some advantages in the playoffs. First, it is easy to keep track of when all of the playoff games are. Fans of a particular team need to find out the starting times, of course, but that's something they need to do in the regular season anyway. But for the first two weeks, it's Saturday 3 PM, Saturday night, Sunday noon, Sunday 3 PM (CST) no matter who is playing. With baseball you have teams playing schedules that are predictable during the season, but the post-season doesn't follow the same format. No way I can watch all of the playoff games in the first round, when there are four a night sometimes, then you have some on weekday afternoons. Then times get switched, series end early, who knows what network the game is on. Take Cardinals-Brewers Game 6. It's supposed to be 3 PM Sunday, but then gets switched because there's no Game 7 for Detroit-Texas. And you would think since Detroit-Texas is gone that the game would be on Fox in its place, but it isn't, it's on TBS instead of Old School which is what my Tivo said was supposed to air. Nothing like making it easy for the viewer.
Frankly, I also think that the large market/small market business that football has avoided makes baseball fans more provincial. In football you can be a Rams fan and tolerate Peyton Manning in Indy or Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay because you figure your team has got a fair shot at drafting the same kind of player and getting to the Super Bowl. The perception in baseball that the big markets have an unbeatable advantage that will last forever has made baseball fans less tolerant of the opposition, to the point that they don't want to watch rival teams in the playoffs if their team is no longer playing. That's my personal feeling and I'm sure some other fans feel that way too, though I'm sure not everyone does.
Exactly. I've been reading the "Never Just a Game" and "More than Just a Game" series of books (I may have botched the book names slightly). It's interesting to see how baseball's owners were forced out of the paternalistic era of the 40s, 50s and 60s into the modern era by competition from other sports, the MLBPA and so on.
I still think that baseball would do much better in the limelight now if it had different leadership at the top, though.
Pedantic is my new favorite word this week.
My recurring fantasy is that some latter day Bill Veeck takes over a small market team**, and with Veeckian imagination---meaning personal and idiosyncratic style, and not focus group driven---begins to connect the team to his city in more than a perfunctory way. Humor and spontaneity would be essential, as would a policy of requiring players to promote the team during the offseason. It may or may not work as planned, but I'd sure love to see someone make the effort. The corporate and wholly standardized stiffness of marketing these days is the one thing that leaves me faintly disgusted with the game, which otherwise has me more interested than ever.
**It would be much harder for teams that routinely sell out already to go this route, since there would be less of an obvious necessity.
I don't think a lot people realize just how few games were televised even 30 years ago. I've got a baseball book at home that deals exclusively with baseball and the media and the appendix lists how many games each team televised from I think 1947 to 1980 or so. By 1980 something like 40% of NL games were televised and less than 40% were televised for AL teams. The split was usually something like 80 or 90% of the away games were televised while about 15 to 20% of the home games were televised. And that was for 1980 so the years before had even less televised games. So in that environment it makes sense that baseball got a higher % of eyeballs watching the tube since you had less options on TV and the game wasn't being aired everyday. If your local team had a 10 or 15 game homestand you might be lucky to watch two of those games on your TV.
Concur, but a deeper postseason means sometimes LCS or LDS will be greater or more compelling.
Yeah -- it's pedantic when I bring up a specific example that flatly contradicts what you just said.
The corporate and wholly standardized stiffness of marketing these days is the one thing that leaves me faintly disgusted with the game, which otherwise has me more interested than ever.
That's exactly how I feel. So much seems planned out an artificial, from the way the game is telecast to the various chants and cheers at the ballpark. Since when did variations on "Lets go Yankees" become standard at all ballparks around the country?
I've got to agree with Jay's #27. Excellent post.
Exactly. That's why it's a shame that the 2004 World Series wasn't closer.
Baseball is well and truly doomed. In totally unrelated news, TV's top-rated sitcom, "Two and a Half Men," is currently averaging about 17 million viewers an episode... or about what an average "The Facts of Life" or "Trapper John, M.D." pulled in the early '80s, while they were hovering in the #20 to #30 range.
The WS hasn't even started yet, but the boilerplate "poor ratings" stories are undoubtedly already in draft form.
I said 80's and you brought up the very first year of that grouping as if that one year proves that the 80's was a great decade ratings wise for baseball. In 1980 baseball had its second highest rated WS, just behind 1978 but by the end of the decade they were down to half the ratings they had in 1980 and were down about 18 million viewers.
Something like 1977 to 1981 or so was the clear high water mark for the WS on TV and the trend since then has been lower and lower ratings and fewer and fewer viewers.
Holy crap, were 2 households watching ChivasUSA vs. the LA Galaxy?
Would you recommend it? What's the title?
until October.
Having a Bill Veeck revitalize a city team didn't work out well when he tried it in Chicago in the mid1970s (although he did give us Tony Larussa after several managerial misfires).
I suppose we should keep "declining interest in baseball" in perspective. I remember Fred Lieb writing an article in SABR journal in the late 1970s saying baseball was more popular in the age of Merkle: two thirds of newspaper sports in season, one-third in the winter.
I am all for indicting Seligula for all his crimes but I can't fault him much for the World series. Maybe he should play on Saturday afternoon instead of evening to give those who can't see evening games a break.
Center Field Shot. Lots of info but rather dull, Lords of the Realm did a much better job of making what could have been a dull story very interesting.
I assume you're talking about James Walker and Robert Bellamy's Center Field Shot, which is a terrific book on a subject that I only knew from a faulty memory and from old editions of The Sporting News Dope Book. But if you look a bit more closely, you'll see that early on (i.e. through the mid to late 50's), the great majority of televised games were home games, not road games. It was only after attendance started plummeting in the early 50's that teams gradually started realizing that the NFL model of televising road games only was the smarter way to approach television. Of course now it's completely different, but back then you could practically figure that every TV in a neighborhood bar cost teams like the Dodgers (who televised all their home games and no road games from 1949 through 1954) about 10 to 20 fans per night per bar.
EDIT: coke to McCoy on the title, even if I think more of the book than he apparently does.
Veeck didn't have the capital or the health to sustain his success, but both times when he owned the White Sox (1959-61 and 1975-80) the team established new home attendance records, in 1960 and again in 1977, a year they won 90 games.
1) It's an event that sucks all the oxygen out of all other events on that day, unlike the world series or any other sport with a championship decided over a series of games;
2) You're likely at some sort of get-together, which means you probably care about the get-together, and will watch the game because it's on, even though you don't care about the game;
3) Have some sort of money wagered, whether it be a bet on the outcome, Super Bowl squares, or something similar;
4) You want to watch the commercials so you'll have something to talk about at work the next day;
5) come up with your own here.
People care about the event, even if they couldn't care less who is playing, who wins, etc. People care about "The Super Bowl". People care a lot less about the actual NFL championship.
*I don't think "city" is a good deciding reference, even if it's right much of the time. I've haven't spent more than a week of my life in Denver. But if the Broncos are in the Super Bowl, I care. If the Bears, from my current city, are in the Super Bowl, I only care to the extent that I want to see them lose...miserably.
Unless you were a Cubs fan. Then you got everything except for mid-week series in San Diego and, oddly, the occasional series in NY.
Or a Braves fan.
A great part of that cutback was due to the Dodgers and the Giants doing a 180 degree turnaround in their TV policy once they got to LA and SF in 1958. In 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers televised all 77 home games and 25 road games, while the New York Giants televised all 77 home games. But in 1958, once they settled out West, neither team televised a single game, and even when they began relenting (in 1959 for LA and 1961 for the Giants), their entire free TV schedule consisted of the 11 road games in each other's park.
as for the football/superbowl - people watch for stuf like point spreads and bets. and superbowls aren't even in one of the cities of the teams who are playing. their fans don't get dibs on tickets if they have season tickets like baseball fans do
superbowl is a huge party
i know a whole lot of poeple who say they are football fans but they don't know the names of the guys on their team, hey don't know their histoies as players they don't usually know any strategy besides sack, punt, pass, run - if that. they DO know the point spreads - you betcha.
LOTS of people play fantasy football/bet on football
LOTS of people watch college football because the athletes are pure and innocent and Do Ti For The Love Of The Game, just like it was back in eden
when you have a lot of channels, home videos, streaming videos, video games, internets, you are gonna get a LOT fewer people watching ANY show
other reason the series isn't as popular is because the media pimps 4 teams heavily all year and basically ignores the otheres because they don't matter so when those 4 teams don't get into the playoffs/make the second round, then fox/tbs freaks out, the media sounds like it is the death knell for the sport and bud selig makes a rule to add anoher game to TRY to make sure that his 4 petsypoos have a sure chance of making the playoffs every year so we can have a yankee/redsox world series every year because why watch anything else as the other teams don't have fans anyhow
certainly not in bristol
It's not a game-by-game breakdown, but this website has a listing of average ratings per series. McCoy is right about 77-81 being the high point of ratings; however, ratings did not decline as quickly as he states, or quite as dramatically. 1989 was the low point, and, interestingly enough, was the lowest rated World Series until 1998. 1983, 1984, 1988 and 1990 also stand out against the argument that short Series always have lower ratings.
1986 is commonly remembered as the best Series of the 80s, and I think the high ratings have more to do with that than the actual quality of games played (I prefer 1980, which had more close games and more late inning comebacks). Even if you ignore the extremely high rated Game 7, the rest of the Series had extremely good numbers -- even the blowouts.
I love the silliness of tv ratings being a proxy for popularity.
Just to match this bit of silliness, I'll tout annual attendence for MLB is higher than it is for the NFL, NBA, NHL and Nascar combined.
I'm not making the claim that 1980 was the high water mark and then it collapsed in 1981 which to me would be pretty close to the definition of dramatic. The ratings declinng throughout the 80's with a blip in the middle. 1985 was consistently around 22 to 25 until game 7. Game 7's ratings jumped to 32.6. Without that bump 1985's improvement isn't a whole lot better than 1984's low rating. 1986's ratings started out at 24 or so and moved to 26 through game 4. 5 and 6 jumped to about 30 and game 7 popped all the way up to 39. Yet 1985 and 1986 were not the start of a new trend. 1987 saw the ratings right back on their downard decline.
The 1984 series started out promising but game 3 had a marked decline and game 4 was an absolute dog. Game 5 got back to game 3 levels but then that was all she wrote. The 1984 series was the lowest rated WS of the 80's and was the least watched WS probably since 1971. The 1983 series was the second least watched series since 1974. 1988 started off badly but then Kirk Gibson happened and the series got a bit of a bump because of it.
Although this is true, and the "most watched" stat is almost entirely the product of United States population growth, it's also true that the NFL's ratings over the past 3-5 years have been an outlier. On the increase, while virtually everything around them has gone down. In some ways, football's current Nielsen performance is more impressive than during its record-setting years.
Did you look at the link I posted? You are right that 1984 was the lowest rated World Series since 1970 (not 1971 -- night games helped ratings). Check out those 1987 and 1988 ratings again: 24.0 wasn't an awful total for the Twins - Cardinals 1987 Series.
I'm amazed that you see a steady, gradual decline for the 1980s, when 1985-1988 actually saw higher ratings than 1983-84. You don't really hit a meaningful decline until 1989 -- and then the CBS contract helped bring things back up as soon as 1990 (which, as we all know, was another sweep).
You know what is really amazing? The 1995 World Series ratings were actually pretty good, despite the increasing availability of alternative programming on cable and satellite, despite the 1994 strike and despite the fact that the broadcasts alternated between two networks. Can somebody explain to me how in the world that Series got a 19.5?
I love the silliness of tv ratings being a proxy for popularity.
Just to match this bit of silliness, I'll tout annual attendence for MLB is higher than it is for the NFL, NBA, NHL and Nascar combined.
Yep -- we know that those annual attendance figures reported by MLB are good measures of the number of butts in seats, that they've never been inflated and that they clearly measure the game's popularity among a cross-section of the nation. I'm also sure that the small size of NBA and NHL arenas and the short NFL and Nascar schedules have nothing to do with this total.
As I've asked before -- do you have a better measure for the relative popularity of each major sport on a national scale?
First, all three New York teams televised all of their home games, and none of their road games, from 1949 (or earlier) through 1957, and the Yankees began adding road games the very next year, after the NL abandoned the city.
The Boston Braves televised all their home games in 1949 and 1950 before cutting back to 54 each in the next two years. They didn't televise a single road game in the entire period, nor did they televise a single game in Milwaukee, home or road, for the first nine years they were there.
The team you may be thinking of was the Cardinals, who televised 30 home games in 1949 and 5 home games each from 1950 through 1953, but then in 1954 adopted the NFL model of televising all their road games while blacking out their entire home schedule.
The first team to approach complete home/road saturation was the 1958 Yankees, who televised all of their home games (which they'd done since at least 1949) and 63 of their 77 road games. That 140 total stood as a record until the Cubs broke it in 1968 with 144*, but the Cubs' new record benefited from the expanded schedule just as surely as Roger Maris's 61*. And AFAICT complete home/road saturation never existed on free TV.
I know why that comparison is stupid, because that's 111 different Americans for the Super Bowl, while many of the 71 million were the same 10 million or so watching each game. On the other hand: that's a boatload of TV sets turned on for the World Series, which for many reasons adduced in this thread is a greatly different event structurally, lacking almost every built-in advantage that the Super Bowl has going for itself. This isn't the world badminton championships or something, though you'd think it from FAs like this one.
Agree. And that's even without taking into account the bizarre antiquity of the Nielsens.
As I've asked before -- do you have a better measure for the relative popularity of each major sport on a national scale?
Just because attendance isn't an incredibly accurate measure of popularity doesn't mean one has to bow to ratings as being somehow better.
I remember reading that when the Giants first came to SF the big idea was Pay-TV. So that may have been a factor in discouraging a lot of free TV in the early years to build a market for Pay-TV.
Pay-TV was O'Malley's grand scheme that Stoneham bought into, complete with coin slots that charged you 50 cents a game.
Don't underestimate this factor, everyone. The media (read: ESPN) does a great job in identifying storylines and players from all across the NFL to run features on(*). In MLB, the Yankees and Red Sox get a disproportionate share of attention from the folks in Bristol.
Of course, this is the nature of football, with the vast majority of its games happening on one day per week. Tuesday through Saturday acts as a lead-in to every single game, so there is plenty of time to discuss every single team (too much time, in my opinion; even my NFL-nerd brain gets supersaturated) beyond a 30-second preview. With baseball, you don't get that until the playoffs, and by then, it's often too late to reel fans in to hear about the Rangers or Brewers or whomever.
However, with the NFL, by the time the playoffs roll around, casual fans will have already become familiar with the Jim-Harbaugh-led 49ers/Alex Smith turnaround. With the dominating Ravens defense. With the emergence of Jimmy Graham as Drew Brees's new favorite target. So they're more likely to keep watching, even after their rooting interest has been eliminated.
------
Is this in response to anything? Or just standard NFL-bashing?
Since MNF began in 1970, the Dolphins and the Cowboys have been featured 76 and 72 times, while the Lions and the Cardinals have been on 25 and 21 times. That's less of a spread than you'll see in baseball, but that also reflects football's relative parity.
I'm not sure if you're refuting my point, supporting it, or just commenting on it.
And the MNF breakdown is certainly true. And there definitely are teams that are significantly more popular (Cowboys, Steelers, Bears, Packers, Patriots) in the NFL. My point is that, for whatever reasons, the media is much better at featuring players and storylines from the less-popular teams.
It is easier to create a storyline when you've murdered/raped/assualted/robbed/smuggler/dealt/accompliced and then got caught.
Who are the less popular teams? I liked to see if I can come up with any storylines or players for them.
I don't really know present day teams, but back when I watched football they had multi-hour pre-game shows on multiple networks that weren't too heavily weighted towards the big teams.* Obviously they primarily focused on the teams that were good that year, but it seemed like most devoted fans were pretty up to speed with the goings-ons of most teams. I think it's also a product of the AL/NL split, but even on a site like this (where we can assume we're all pretty big fans of baseball) you'll ocassionally see a "Jason Bartlett is on the Padres now?" or "wow I knew Napoli was hitting well, but I had no idea he was slugging over .600!"
I think that kind of thing would be less common, if it happens at all, at similarly passionate general NFL sites.
*seemingly every week there were the "are the Bengals finally good" stories, the Flutie/Rob Johnson QB controversy in Buffalo seemed to get regular attention that one year.
I'm not sure if you're refuting my point, supporting it, or just commenting on it.
More of a comment, since while there's disproportionate coverage of certain NFL teams, the identity of those teams is more likely to vary over the years. But again, that's largely due to football's relative parity, and if the Rangers become as dominant over the next 15 years as the Yankees have been since 1995, I'm sure that ESPN will alter its emphasis accordingly. Sometimes it's hard to tell the chicken from the egg when it comes to the national media's coverage.
1989 had the ten-day earthquake delay. It's not at all useful as a data point. Baseball wasn't exactly the top item on California's mind and the rest of the nation had lost interest waiting for it to resume.
Now that the Detroit Lions are showing signs of being a potential powerhouse team in the years ahead, expect to see them on SNF/MNF a lot more than they were during the doormat years (most of my lifetime, with a couple of Barry Sanders exceptions).
1989 had the ten-day earthquake delay. It's not at all useful as a data point
The earthquake hit before game 3. Game 1 and 2 had extremely crappy ratings and game 3, when it was played, had the best ratings of all the games which is not the norm for the World Series. With or without the earthquake the ratings for that series was going to be crappy. It doesn't look like the earthquake had any impact on the ratings if anything it slightly helped boost the ratings.
It is only bashing if you are uncomfortable with facts. It's simply a statement of fact. It is also another fact that according to Forbes, college football is more profitable than the NFL. It made more $$ than the NFL last year. Another fact.
It was also a dog of a series. The obviously superior team jumped out to a 2-0 lead. They probably should have just called it after the earthquake.
Geez, I would hope so. 120 or so tier I teams (or whatever Division 1 called nowadays) paying 11 or so games a year and then throwing 30 odd mini-Super Bowls each year should generate a ton of money. Then throw all the other football teams at the college level and I should think it would be obvious that college football and the hundreds of teams that play each year would make more money than 32 professional teams.
As for profits, college doesn't have to pay players salaries!
I need to see the source for this fact, because I simply don't buy it. NFL total revenues in 2010 were eight billion. Getting an exact number on total revenues in college football is much harder, but most of the estimates I've seen for 2010 were in the neighborhood of around 2.5-3 billion.
Joey, re-read what I wrote. Revenue is not the same as profit.
Texas AM made more proft than the Super Bowl Champion Packers.
*as for source, Forbes data on this is all over the internet. You may have to google it.
Greg touched on this, but:
- Andy Dalton's surprising success as a rookie (Cincinnati)
- Cam Newton blowing away everyone's expectations (Carolina)
- Jim Harbaugh leading his team to a fast start (49ers)
- controversy over Brandon Marshall's comments (Dolphins - who are no longer a very popular team)
- coach firing watches (Kansas City, Jacksonville)
You wrote, "It is also another fact that according to Forbes, college football is more profitable than the NFL. It made more $$ than the NFL last year. Another fact." I took your first sentence to mean profit and your second sentence to mean revenue. I didn't realize you were saying the same thing twice.
Why not? If the NFL and media is going hype TV ratings as some be all measure, I'm going to point out the NFL is the 2nd most profitable form of football in America. Face it, the top 32 college football teams pack in way more fans than the NFL does.
There are many ways to measure popularity. I can tell you profit is about the most time tested way to measure consumer interest in any business. Business ideas that fail to make money aren't usually popular.
College football, and MLB, for that matter, are great at getting a lot of $$ from their most passionate fans. The NFL is better at getting a little $$ from the masses.
EDIT: Basically, you're letting the money spent by the league/organization factor into its "popularity". I don't see why that makes sense to do.
I love the silliness of tv ratings being a proxy for popularity.
When neutral fans have the opportunity to watch an elimination playoff baseball game or a regular season matchup between Jay Cutler and a washed up Donovan McNabb and they overwhelmingly choose the pigskin, it's pretty tough not to conclude football might be more popular.
Baseball's attendance figures are simply a factor of big stadiums, an incredibly long season, and the fact that most teams are just pulling the nightly numbers out of thin air.
Today my kids are about that same age but they don't care much about baseball. I would love to watch the Series with them since my Rangers are in it again this year, but the games all drag on until well after their bed times. And frankly, my kids would rather play internet games like Roblox or Minecraft than to watch live sports on TV. I think that most of my teenage college students are either surfing porn or blowing each others' heads off in internet shooters than watching TV.
So as long as we have more interactive entertainment like the internet options, I don't expect the WS to get huge ratings again.
Thanks to Mayor Blomberg for the WS ratings link. I hadn't realized how much the ratings spiked for a Game 7.
- Andy Dalton's surprising success as a rookie (Cincinnati)
- Cam Newton blowing away everyone's expectations (Carolina)
- Jim Harbaugh leading his team to a fast start (49ers)
- controversy over Brandon Marshall's comments (Dolphins - who are no longer a very popular team)
- coach firing watches (Kansas City, Jacksonville)
I have no idea who Andy Dalton is.
I've know about Cam Newton but he was a top draft pick. People also know about Stephen Strasburg.
The only reason I know Jim Harbaugh is the 49ers head coach is because of the handshake controversy last Sunday.
I have no idea who Brandon Marshall is.
I have no idea which coaches are on the hot seat. I hope to god this is Smith's last year though.
Well, to be fair the way you wrote it it appears that you were presenting two facts. One that they were more profitable than the NFL and that two they had more revenue than the NFL.
Again, I don't see why they shouldn't be more profitable than the NFL. Colleges don't have to pay players a salary. What is the collectively bargained ratio that goes to player salaries in the NFL? 60%? Then throw in pensions and all the rest that the NFL has to pay for and college doesn't and we're talking about two completely different cost structures.
I think that's more a function of the nature of the sport. As a baseball fan I'm engrossed in my team and watching them every night. As a football fan I have a week between games to get caught up on what happened in the other 15 games. If I'm a moderately serious fan I can have a pretty good handle on every team in the sport by the end of the night Wednesday. As a baseball fan there is "today's action" every day so just because Mike Napoli is having a huge year unless I'm seeking out Ranger information nightly it can be pretty easy to miss him.
Hey, the Rangers have won three in a row, the heroes were Derek Holland, Josh Hamilton and David Murphy. Maybe Napoli (4 for 13 with a HR) gets a mention over those three days but he can be productive and not get mentioned. If the Chiefs have a new star running back then as a football fan I'm going to hear about it before the Chiefs take the field on Sunday.
As Jose said a player in baseball doesn't always do things that can generate headlines like a QB/WR/DE/RB/LB can on Sunday. Pujols goes 1 for 3 with a double and a walk and that is a good day but you don't lead off Sportscenter with that.
This is a big and invisible factor. I wouldn't be surprised if the national no-show rate for MLB is on the order of 30%. I know I've seen plenty of Mets games with an announced attendance of 25k where the stadium is maybe a quarter full with 10k or so actual people. I also think the Mets are probably the league leader in no-shows or close to it, with a big base of NYC corporate buyers but so far from downtown with a currently lackluster team. Of course MLB will never release an iota of data on no-shows, but a decent proxy is how far below face value tickets are available on Stubhub and other resellers.
The NFL must have some no-shows too, especially in the places like Jacksonville where the TV station buys the last 3000 tickets so they can televise the game, but it can't be anywhere near MLB's rate.
The NFL cooks numbers too. The most glaring recent example (off the top of my head) was a Week 16 game [in 2008] at KC - - the Dolphins at the 2-12 Chiefs. Attendance was announced at 73,000, but in 10-degree temperature only about 4,000 showed up.
I missed the beginning of the discussion but I was under the impression that that's the point being made. (With the additional note that the AL/NL split further insulates the fan from the wider sport)
For a variety of reasons the NFL is more conducive to league-following rather than team-following.
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