NOVEMBER 1 ― Earlier this week San Francisco Giants maintained their dominant position as baseball’s most powerful team by winning their third World Series in the space of five years, defeating Kansas City Royals 4-3 in an exciting series which went the distance to seven games for only the second time in 12 years.
If the California club’s success passed you by unnoticed, you can be forgiven: baseball is suffering from a significant loss of interest even in its home market of the United States ― never mind the rest of the world.
The first game of the series attracted just over 12 million television viewers in the US, around ten million fewer than the number of fans routinely drawn by run-of-the-mill regular season NFL American Football games at this time of year.
Although the audience levels improved during the course of the series, reaching a peak of 23.5 million for the decisive seventh game, the overall figures reflect an ongoing trend of declining figures for the championship series, which routinely attracted more than 30 million viewers in the 1980s but never comes close to those heady numbers any more.
For baseball fans, perhaps the most disturbing statistic to emerge from the World Series is the fact that the TV audience of 12.2 million for Game One was less than half the number of Americans who watched their country’s soccer team play against Portugal in last summer’s soccer World Cup Finals. If the prospect of becoming less popular than soccer doesn’t make the baseball authorities worried, nothing will.
The disappointing audiences for the latest World Series are a particular blow because, in theory, the contest should have been perfectly timed to take advantage of a perceived crisis of confidence in the NFL, which has been beset by player disciplinary problems and a stark realisation that participation in the sport is leaving players with long-term serious head injuries.
With the media full of stories about the NFL’s latest off-field woes and controversies, the World Series should have been a great opportunity for the sport of baseball to reassert itself as America’s favourite pastime.
However, that clearly didn’t happen ― perhaps instead proving in the NFL’s favour that no publicity is bad publicity ― and there’s now an unmistakable feeling that baseball is on its way towards becoming a minority activity.
Theories abound in an attempt to explain baseball’s apparent decline, with an interesting article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper speculating that America’s increasing fascination with its version of football is a reflection of an increasingly aggressive, violent culture.
Perhaps that’s true, but I believe it’s more the case ― although not entirely unrelated ― that baseball is suffering because it is just too slow and subtle to capture the imagination of television audiences who increasingly demand instant gratification and spectacular action.
Baseball is fundamentally a very simple sport: one man throws the ball and another attempts to hit it as far as he can. On that level, it’s also not very interesting: to the untrained eye there are only so many possible variations of throwing and hitting, and the whole process can appear rather repetitive and tedious.
Truly appreciating the sport ― something I have never managed, I must confess ― requires a far deeper understanding of the nuances: how and why is the pitcher releasing the ball in a certain way, what is the angle, tilt and swing of the bat and how does that affect the direction of the shot…unless you have a detailed knowledge of baseball, these things are not easy to spot and the sport is thus reduced to a simple process of throwing and hitting.
Modern sports audiences, certainly the television variety, don’t want to have to spend any time learning subtle points about backswing and spin. They want boom, crash, bang and wallop ― exactly the kind of thing provided by American Football’s crunching tackles and long-bomb passing plays.
In that respect, baseball is very similar to test match cricket, which has also endured a dramatic loss of interest over the last couple of decades.
Indeed, it could be argued that cricket has, to an extent, been rescued only by the invention and wholesale adoption of a new form of the sport which was purposefully designed to cater for the demands of action-thirsty TV viewers: T20 cricket.
Unlike test matches, which drag on for five days and only really appeal to true aficionados of the sport, T20 games edit out all the ‘boring’ slow stuff and cram themselves full with massive slogs and wickets, and pretty much nothing else.
T20 is a very different proposition to cricket as purists would understand the sport, but it is hugely successful and attracts far more viewers ― both at home and in the stadia ― than conventional forms of the game.
Perhaps that is what baseball needs: the invention of a new form of the game, a fast-moving and spectacular version where subtleties such as batters deliberately leaving tricky pitches and pitchers deliberately “walking” batters become outlawed, reducing the sport to nothing more than a series of strike-outs and home runs.
Traditionalists would be aghast, but something needs to be done to maintain the sport’s position in the mainstream. And if cricket, the bastion of old-school respectability and tradition, can re-invent itself for modern audiences, so can baseball.
*This is personal opinion of the columnist.
