Major League Baseball is on suicide watch

Or, at least, it should be - regardless of whether a deal gets struck.

I’ve been a baseball fan longer than any other sport. I suspect this is true for a lot of Americans in my generation - while it has a lot of complex rules, at its core it’s fairly easy to both learn and play as a kid. (I suspect many younger children these days are more into soccer and basketball than baseball, but I have only anecdotal evidence to support this.)

I’m also a San Francisco Giants fan and have been since I moved to the Bay Area in the early 1980s as a kid. There was a time where it was a fairly local experience - so I could see Giants and A’s games, but rarely any other teams. It was special to see those teams, so I could easily find myself watching a random Braves or Cubs games during the week because they, unlike so many other teams, had national TV contracts on TBS and WGN. And the Saturday Game of the Week was a legit big deal.

I’m not arguing that we should go back to that - the TV revenue that each team has gotten over the years has fundamentally been good for players and especially owners and without it, the sport would be in even more trouble. And undoubtedly, that exposure leads to more ticket sales and that’s a huge revenue source for each team as well. On the other hand …

I’m not here to debate the issues involved in this labor standoff - I side with the players, but the sad thing is … I really, really don’t care that much. Baseball has gotten so less interesting over the years. I’m a Giants fan, not necessarily a baseball fan. I will watch the Jaguars play the Jets (or insert any other awful NFL teams) fairly easily. I can’t imagine watching almost any baseball game not involving my team.

Joe Posnanski, as he almost always does, summed this up super well* - and pointed out some basic statistics that show how much the game has gotten WAY less watchable in just the last five seasons:

Defensive shifts: Up 125%

Strikeouts: Up 8%

Home runs: Up 6%

Games with teams using five pitchers or more: Up 30%

Balls in play: Down 6%

Time between balls in play: Up 29%

Hits: Down 7%

Triples: Down 23%

Stolen base attempts: Down 17%

Home runs being up, that’s probably good for viewability. Everything else here stinks. Balls in play are down 6% and the time in between those rarer events is up 29%. Stolen bases, one of the most fun parts of the game, are being attempted way less (and Posnanski goes into the fact that they’re successful at a historically HIGH rate, so this is nonsensical).

If you get the feeling that guys are trying to hit home runs at the expense of any other hit, this supports that. And the defensive shift, while annoying, isn’t so problematic. I do appreciate that it’s not as easy as a chump like me suggests to “just hit it to the opposite field and take your base” but no one really tries to do that.

I always get the impression that the game has gotten so much duller, with so much less action - and these stats support that. We’ve increasingly become a society that needs to have things HAPPEN. Watch any movie from the early 1970s and you will be stunned at how much time on film there is where nothing happens. Whether that effectively sets up the plot in Serpico or The Conversation is one thing. How it helps this generation of sports fans get excited about baseball is another. At some point, the league will make a deal with players, and folks will get back on the field.

But who is watching? And more importantly, why? I did a random search for “baseball boring” and it there were 28,700,000 search results. And you know what? Very few of them showed pictures of KIDS. It’s old people being bored or going to the games as the few photos I have in this post show. That should be terrifying for baseball as an institution. And yet, it doesn’t seem like they’re doing anything to make the game more FUN.

The diehard fans will return, always. But no sport thrives with just the diehards - they need casual fans to want to go out to the field or park at least occasionally. Basketball thrives from this, despite being incredibly expensive. Football is such a good TV sport and has smaller stadiums that it becomes an event to go to a game, and most teams sell out all their home games. Baseball? I just don’t see it whatsoever. Certainly, COVID has thrown a massive wrench into this, but this was clear prior to the pandemic.

I am still a big Giants fan, and will continue to love to support them - and clearly the team has some of the very best fans in baseball. But the overall sports? Baseball might be dead. And they don’t even know or care.

*If you aren’t subscribed to Joe Posnanski and have an even remote interest in baseball, correct that immediately. Follow that link and hit Subscribe. DO IT NOW.