My favorite west coaster recently penned a column talking about baseball’s dwindling African-American fanbase. When I was on the fourth paragraph of my own comment, I realized I had started a column. This isn’t meant to be taken as a response to Cam’s column… more of an expansion.
Cam’s marketing thought was this: Major League Baseball’s inability, for example, to market the early ’90s version of Ken Griffey Jr. is one of the most egregiously inept promotional failures in business history. Since lessened by the 1994 strike, steroids and Junior’s own star-crossed career, there simply hasn’t been a player more universally loved whose appeal stretched across to any ethnicity like The Kid. Baseball, however, was content to let Nintendo and Nike to their dirty work.
This is the first of two excellent points. But the above represents just a portion of baseball’s marketing issue. We spoke about this at length with some of the folks at Minneapolis SEO services our conversation boiled down to the fact that, really, baseball as a whole has never never quite figured out how to market themselves nationally. People just don’t watch national broadcasts unless it’s their own team. It’s an issue unique to baseball. The NFL only has national broadcasts. The NBA on TNT routinely doubles up baseball’s national broadcasts. It takes baseball’s two largest markets meeting in August to get to a 3.5 — roughly equivalent to an episode of WWE’s Monday Night Raw — and that was ESPN’s most watched baseball game since the same two largest markets met in September of 2007. Why the malaise?
Baseball is the only game played every day for six months. As a National League fan I spend, on average, 2:40 per day with the Mets. American League fans spend a little more. I watch baseball on my own team’s channel with my own team’s announcers. I’m as spoiled with Gary Cohen, one of the best radio guys ever, as Dodgers fans are with Vin Scully. When I, as a viewer, get comfortable with SNY’s terrific, slick production and excellent booth — it annoys me to watch another channel’s broadcast. To watch a national broadcast, baseball wants me to spend another 3+ hours with two different teams listening to a play-by-play guy who can’t sniff Cohen’s microphone? What would motivate a fan to spend six hours of any day watching anything? Even worse, the length of national broadcasts are absurd.
In days of yore, guys who walked instead of hitting were considered bad offensive players. Guys swung at bad pitches. In the modern day, we put as much stock in “pitches per plate appearance” as batting average. Like football, every rule change in the last thirty years has encouraged offense. The pitching mounds have been lowered to help the batters. The strike zone has been narrowed to help the batters. In the American League, an extra batter was added to the line-up. A ball that might be scuffed is removed from play. Non-Latino players are taught from a very young age to swing at only the pitch they want and to get on base by any means necessary; the apex of this being last week’s Yankee/Red Sox game in which Nick Swisher — with a 1-0 count, men on 2nd and 3rd, and 2-out — tried to talk his way in to an HBP and leave the stress for the next guy. After all these rule changes, all to benefit the offense, baseball finally took a step back and realized what they’d done. Baseball doesn’t have a clock. By empowering offense, baseball made it harder to get outs and added 45-minutes to the average length of a baseball game. According to a 2003 column in USA Today:
Games lasted 2:52 in 2002. As recently as 1983, the Elias Sports Bureau reported games averaged 2:36, while games 60 years ago took an incredible 1:58 to complete, according to The Sporting News.
Some of the additional time is obviously induced by television breaks, but instead of addressing the problem with real rule changes, they tried to quicken the game with inane, unenforceable rules like the 12-second pitch clock. With this extending of the modern game, a good fan will spend 15-20 hours per week watching their team. A really good fan will watch their team’s half-hour pregame, the game itself, and their team’s hour long post-game. Baseball wants its fans to watch that and, in addition, another three hours watching Joe Morgan dissect a Dodgers/Giants game that, at best, means almost nothing to me as a National League East fan or, at worst, means absolutely nothing to an American League fan? There is nothing to draw me to watch a meaningless baseball game. This ties directly to another one of Cam’s points:
It’s been my experience that African-American sports fans – including myself – gravitate towards larger-than-life personalities. Baseball, on the other hand, insists on checking personalities at the door. This wasn’t always the case as talents like Reggie Jackson – and even non-talents like Ken Harrelson – roamed America’s ballparks with impunity. […] I’m not suggesting that baseball become pro basketball, but when Eric Byrnes’ superfluous hustle and Nick Swisher’s kamikaze redneck schtick pass for personality across rosters eager to emulate Kevin McReynolds’ mood…well, yeah. — Strikethrough mine.
In addition to the checking of personalities — the number of must-watch players in baseball is infinitesimal. None of them are position players. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, watches a national broadcast for a position player’s five plate appearances. There were only two games I went out of my way to watch this year: a Tim Lincecum start on Fox Saturday and Pedro Martinez’s first Phillies start. In neither case was it about their personality but instead the chance that they’d do something memorable. Maybe a dozen pitchers at any given time are on this highly mutable must-watch list. Dontrelle Willis in 2006. Edison Volquez last year. Zack Greinke earlier this season. Roy Halladay, Randy Johnson, and Johan Santana always. Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens until their recent retirements. This is what baseball totally misses. They spend so much time worrying about offense and promoting their hitters that they forget there are only two guys on the field involved in every play. Shouldn’t these guys be the focus of promotional campaigns? Shouldn’t these be the guys Fox or ESPN grabs for the national broadcasts? On Saturday May 9th, 2009, a 6-0 Zack Greinke went up against Joe Saunders — right smack in the middle of Greinkemania. The week before, he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Instead of choosing to showcase Greinke on THEIR OWN NETWORK, baseball instead decided to show a Reds/Cardinals game featuring Kyle Lohse and Aaron Harang. This is where baseball marketing fails. Fans missed out on an 8-inning, 5K, 1-0 loss for Greinke. Instead, they got a generic Reds/Cardinals game in which Albert Pujols went 0-4 with 1K. Fans who watched the MLB Network broadcast got 5 minutes of Pujols when they could have gotten 8 innings of Greinke and 9 innings of Saunders.
Unfortunately, baseball is the most resistant to change. The absolutely easiest way to speed games up is to eliminate the DH, reinstate the letter high strike, and not allow batters to step out in between pitches. But, if anything, the National League will likely adopt the DH in the coming years. It’s this romantic feeling of baseball’s unchanging, constant nature that makes it so resistant. It’s the only sport that caters to crusty old men. Indeed, it’s the only sport where “crusty” is badge of honor. It’s the third and final thing that hurts baseball marketing and something they, by and large, can’t acknowledge — their fans are becoming smarter than the guys paid to write about the sport. A 12-year-old fan with a concept of division and a Internet connection can get a dump of his team’s statistics for the last century. If he happens on the right website, he can discover why a sacrifice bunt is a stupid play unless a pitcher is batting. But baseball, because of its crustiness and desire to get people off its lawn has a dogged insistence at holding on to its fallacies. Besides that, writers have a dogged insistence of repeating platitudes over and over. In August 10th issue of Sports Illustrated alone:
- Joe Posnanski writes an article about David Ortiz, talking about how no one can believe he did steroids — except everyone can absolutely believe that he did steroids.
- “Who’s Not, Who’s Not” asks if the “Home Run Derby Curse” has struck Brandon Inge since he’s hit .180 since going 0-10 in the Derby. It seems far more likely to anyone with a hint of sense that Inge, who’d been hitting .268 with a .515 SLG before the break, just recalled he’s actually Brandon Inge — a career .238/.307/.398 hitter regressing to, well, a .238 hitter — and had no business slugging .515. Do you know what the odds of one out of ten players slumping after the Home Run Derby? Pretty good.
- Joe Sheehan implored his readers not to be fooled by the Phillies addition of Cliff Lee — that the Dodgers are still the class of the National League based, I guess, the 4 extra wins on their record at the time, their 4-3 advantage in the head-to-head series, and their 3 extra wins against the AL. Never mind Clayton Kershaw’s innings/start average and Joe Torre’s penchant for destroying his best relievers.
- Lee Jenkins penned a three-page article about Pablo Sandoval and longing for the days of the bad-ball hitter. Never mind the fact that both Nomar and Vlad have shown us exactly how well bad-ball hitters age. He also gives us the following gem: Across the Bay Bridge from Oakland, the Giants have countered Moneyball with Sandoball. They rank last in the majors in walks and on-base percentage but were tied with the Rockies for the National League wild-card race, thanks largely, of course, to a pitching staff anchored by Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain. “We don’t have a lot of what I call ‘professional hitters,'” says Giants hitting coach Carney Lansford. Not mentioned is the fact that the Giants are the 2nd worst team in the league at scoring runs. The only team worse is the Padres who, and I can’t confirm this, fill out their lineup card based on a raffle held during batting practice.
- Gary Smith writes six pages on a kid from South Africa who grew up on a ballfield and, when he arrived in the Pirates’ system, was actually not an over-entitled ass.
Combine all of this together — the lack of any effective national marketing, the active decision to market to old men, dismissing any idea of marketing to children, the refusal to acknowledge that old platitudes are wrong, the active lengthening of game, athletes who are increasingly difficult to root for, writers who willfully ignored the steroid era deciding to now crush the league for not preventing it, and just refusing to come to grips with the modern day — and baseball is leaving a mess for the next commissioner to inherit. He’s going to be left with a system in which some of his teams can’t afford to field a major league roster because Tom Hicks’s A-Rod contract broke baseball. Mostly, he’s going to inherit a league that’s been marketed to the wrong people for far too long. He’s going to find himself in charge of a league with a dearth of fans under 40 because the previous commissioner thought it more important to cater to ancient newspaper writers then young fans. He’ll be in charge of a league that has blindly refused to address new technologies — in which baseball-reference.com and Cot’s Baseball Contracts are more viable sources of information then the league’s own homepage. And, quite possibly, he’ll find himself in charge of one of the last, most visible Good Old Boy networks in the country.
I don’t know, exactly, how to fix it… but I know the entire sport feels like it’s on the waning stages of a bubble and that’s not a good place. During the steroid era nobody asked any questions because nobody asks questions when everyone’s making money (see also: Banks). Right now, they’re still not asking questions.
When they’re forced to ask them, it might be too late.
Thomas Daniels is a contributor various zones on Inside Pulse, including Wrestling and Primetime Pulse. All of his columns can be found on his personal blog
