Football Leaving Baseball in the Dust [why did you post this here, you ask? See #6.]

ESPN/MLB ^ | February 10, 2004 | Sean McAdam

[LowCountryJoe]

More out of habit than anything else, we still refer to baseball as the national pastime.

In truth, the tag hasn't fit for some time. Football began making inroads as far back as the 1970s, and two decades later, it wasn't much of a contest anymore. If baseball still had the hearts and minds of the American sports fan, then football could lay claim to everything else.

By any measure -- TV viewership, merchandise sold, fan surveys -- football rules. The game may not be superior, but it undeniably is more popular.

Some of that is baseball's fault; some of it is not. A look at what switched America's sports pecking order around.

1. TV

If ever a sport seemed made for television, it's football. Neatly packaged into three-hour programming blocks, it provides networks with dependable programming.

What's more, it's as if football moves across the screen, as though developed by a TV executive. While baseball features a one-on-one matchup who stand 60 feet apart from one another, football involves 22 players, all of whom are lined up in an area far more compact.

At the snap of the ball, all but a handful of players are within camera view. In baseball, the opposite is true.

Football's unique setup allows each game to (potentially) be a national telecast. With baseball, it's a hodgepodge lineup with an array of local broadcast options.

Baseball's Game of the Week takes place on warm summer afternoons when people are at the beach, the mountains or amusement parks. Football's national telecasts take place in the late fall and winter, when inclement weather in many parts of the country forces people inside to gather around the electronic hearth.

2. Violence

Football is chartitably called a contact sport. In actuality, it's a collision sport. You can watch a nine-inning baseball game and never see two players come in physical contact with one another.

Not so with football, which guarantees high-speed crashes between players of ever-increasing size and strength on every play.

The more fierce the collision, the better. And once again, TV helps out here, zooming in on these crashes and showing them in slow motion, giving them the look of a stylized ballet.

A very, very violent stylized ballet, that is.

3. Gambling

Football easily lends itself to wagering. Team A is favored by three points over Team B. Pick one and watch your investment play out for the next several hours.

Ever try to decipher baseball odds? There's something in there about one team being plus-130, and the other being a minus-120. You need a degree in calculus to make sense of it all.

Meanwhile, tens of millions watch an otherwise uninteresting Monday Night Football matchup to the very end because they've got the under, or they've picked the team with the nice blue uniforms in the office pool.

The league -- unofficially of course -- helps sanction this interest. While baseball investigates Pete Rose to the ends of the earth, football demands that its teams compile a full and accurate injury report by mid-week.

For the, um, fans.

4. Attention span

Colletively, we don't have one. Not a very long one, anyway, and it's baseball's bad fortune to demand focus and involvement.

Not so with football. A play is run, a replay or three is shown, and before you know, the offense is breaking from the huddle. And never mind that studies have shown that there's actually about 10 minutes worth of action in a given NFL game.

Thanks to TV, it sure seems more.

Baseball, meanwhile, is languid and leisurely. A single at-bat, producing no more than foul balls, can last for several minutes. To the hard-core fan, this can be fascinating and provide time for conversation and analysis.

For too many others, however, it makes baseball d-u-l-l.

For a culture accustomed to the quick-cut edits of MTV and instand satisfaction, baseball is hopelessly out-of-date.

The fact that football is generally played one day a week -- while every baseball team plays every day for six months -- is another point in the NFL's favor.

It's a serious investment of one's time to watch a team for 162 games. Not so with football, whose 16-game schedule better suits the busy lifestyle.

5. Labor peace

Football has it. Baseball can only dream of it.

The last work stoppage in football came in 1987, almost a generation ago, and lasted only a few games. The last baseball stoppage came in 1994 and wiped out half the season, the World Series, and part of the next spring training.

Only 18 months ago, baseball stood on the brink of another disaster, and though it was averted at the 11th hour, the mere possibility of another stoppage did some damage.

It's a perverse dictum, but as a general rule, the weaker the union in a particular sport, the more popular the game seems to be with the American public.

That's bad news for baseball -- whose Players Association is mighty and nearly undefeated in the legal arena -- and good news for the NFL, which runs roughshod over its Players Association.

6. Socialism

Forty-something years ago, former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle had the brilliant business sense to determine that what was good for one team was good for all. [I don't think he wrote that tongue & Cheek] Revenue sharing has made it possible for a team in Green Bay to compete on equal footing with two teams in New York and other large cities.

Not so in baseball, where it's every club for itself. Parity has improved in baseball, and likely will continue to do so under the current collective bargaining agreement. But beyond poor management in Phoenix -- and until recently in Cincinnati -- NFL fans don't feel disenfranchised.

Try telling that to baseball fans in small-market cities likes Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and others.

None of which is to suggest that baseball has completely lost its hold on the sporting public. It's still the game that more people attend in person than any other. It's mid-season exhibition game draws more viewers to TV than any other during the summer months. And it's important grab on the American psyche was never more apparent than in the days and weeks following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But baseball has ceded its title of American pastime, and more than likely, it's not going to get it back anytime soon.

[LowCountryJoe]

The indoctrination process is everywhere! It's even in the black helicopter circling above my home.

[narby]

The NFL is a wierd business model. It's more like a collective ownership of the league, rather than owning an individual team.

[cruiserman]

I disagree with the author on #6. He should read the book on the Oakland A's, Moneyball.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Well, maybe, but I've lost interest in every major league sports team except the San Francisco Giants. And I used to be a big fan of the NFL and NBA, but they just don't really interest me any more.

[Billthedrill]

I dunno - I prefer a sport you don't have to be a genetic mutant to play at the professional level.

Pitchers and catchers report to camp in 10 days. Play ball!

[Defendingliberty]

So why is NASCAR beating Baseball? In NASCAR the Rich win...Baseball started this downturn with the advent of late night "World Series".....

[discostu]

Revenue sharing isn't socialism. Each team is a franchise that's part of the whole of the league, just like each McDonald's is part of the whole of the restaurant chain. Revenue sharing is simply a matter of making the franchises able to compete with each other better so the whole league can compete better with the other sports thus bringing additional revenue to all teams. It's capitalism writ large.

At his Hall of Fame acceptance speech Howie Long said that while baseball might be America's past time football is America's present.

[jpl]

It's a perverse dictum, but as a general rule, the weaker the union in a particular sport, the more popular the game seems to be with the American public.

It's perverse only to someone who's brain is permanently stuck back in the 60s and 70s. The days of the poor, beleaguered professional athlete who had no rights and was often forced to work at other jobs in the offseason ended quite some time ago. Now we're in the era where many players makes more money in one year than the average person earns in a lifetime, rendering the notion of player's "unions" little more than an obscene joke to the fans.

[JmyBryan]

The large percentage of baseball action is a duel bt the pitcher and the batter. Not exactly all that stimulating. Artful and talent-laden yes, but a perfect game is 81 throws and catches bt the pitcher and the catcher.

In contrast, football has defense and offense that can happen anywhere on the field, at any time. Speed, complexity and a lot more strategery.

[TravisBickle]

Another reason football is also becoming so popular is that it now has an established history with stars and legends.

While baseball could talk about a century of legends and World Series heroes going back to Babe Ruth and beyond, the first Super Bowl didn't even sell out in 1967. But as new generations hear and see film clips of legends, it begins to approach the cross-generational appeal that baseball once had to itself.

As a boy, I loved to watch games with my Grandpa, who loved it when he was a boy. And now, my son loves watching games with me, and I tell him stories about Walter Payton, or Earl Campbell. He claims Marshall Faulk and Peyton Manning are the great ones, but now we have realistic arguments.

My son I love both games, but football simply has the better athletes.

[thoughtomator]

I don't think 'socialism' is a proper term for it.

The value and revenues of every team are profoundly affected by the quality of the league as a whole. The parity achieved by the NFL lifts all boats and makes all franchises more valuable. The socialist economic model doesn't apply - it is not feasible in a sport to leave every franchise to sink or swim entirely on its own, because competitiveness is a major part of the product that the league is trying to sell. It can't do that if the same large-market teams use their revenue advantage to win year after year after year. It's boring to see that happen, and it causes fans to lose interest, and revenue to drop, even for the winning teams, so it is ultimately against the capitalist interest of the league for it to adopt or allow such a model.

It's not just the teams that compete - the league competes against other sports and other entertainment. In this way, the low-revenue teams are more like low-revenue departments in a company - they may not make money, they may in fact lose money, but they are essential to the entire enterprise being economically viable, and that's why they are there.

[dead]

I hate parity in the NFL.

No more all time great football teams.

No more hated dynasties.

No more Cinderalla stories.

You can't even have a ten-point underdog anymore.

If I wanted to watch a game where every outcome is a coin toss, I'd watch coin tossing.

[newgeezer]

But baseball has ceded its title of American pastime

Not for me and my household. Baseball forever.

(Our culture's move away from baseball toward football simply mirrors our culture's greater ills.)

[rabidralph]

You have one, too?!

[quantim]

You nailed it! I will add that the notion of "franchise" is about "brand." It is not so much about hockey, football, baseball, etc. as it is the brand, and in this case it is the NFL, not football per se. They are promoting themselves as a 'league' rather than a sport and the symbiotic benefit (revenue sharing) is commonly practiced in the form of a franchise. The better the franchise, the more revenue they will draw in various forms.

MLB has done a pathetic job compared to the NFL in recent decades.

[Pharmboy]

He left out one important point: it is the PERFECT TV sport since the football is big enough to be seen easily on the screen.

[KantianBurke]

"The last baseball stoppage came in 1994 and wiped out half the season, the World Series, and part of the next spring training."

That killed my interest in baseball. Bunch of whiner millionaires. Watching my folks work their hearts out for their family while these chumps complained was too much.

[NYCVirago]

Not so in baseball, where it's every club for itself. Parity has improved in baseball, and likely will continue to do so under the current collective bargaining agreement.

There is socialism in baseball -- it's called the luxury tax. The small-market teams take their luxury tax money from teams like the Yankees, and keep it as their own profits, instead of improving thier teams. Then they whine about how evil the Yankees are. They sound like libs to me.

[discostu]

That's because the NFL has had a driving vision. Pete Rozell had a vision of what he wanted the NFL to achieve and how it should achieve it, he made sure Paul Taglabeau shared as much of that vision as possible before he stepped down. One set of goals, one road map, has driven the NFL since before the modern (Superbowl) era. No other major sports league can say that. The unified TV contracts, parity, peace with the players, always keeping the needs of the whole league above any individual team, being primarily seen on broadcast TV instead of cable; these were all part of Pete's plan, some specifically some generally, and they are the foundation of the NFL's supremacy.

[barker]

Go Royals!!!!