I've spent a little time on baseball previously, taking jabs at the "No. 1 game in America," but I figured I'd dedicate a little more attention to baseball's decline. Specifically honing in on Major League Baseball and possible causes of the aforementioned decline of baseball as the MLB season finally winds down, I'm also out to prove that pro football is currently America's top sport. Allow me to explain.
Let's focus on Steve Berthiaume's recent piece on ESPN about how beautiful 162 games are. Sentimental, yes, but perhaps misguided. Berthiaume touchingly explains that you can check in anytime and be thrilled and "baseball as a daily experience is the real payoff." Happy days.
He argues that football is "fast food" as it requires only a few hours of attention and the other days are spent "mindlessly" analyzing the game and fantasy football projections.
His biggest beef with football is actually, really, ARGUABLY the biggest reason it feasts on ratings. Football is fast, it's quick, it's a rush and essentially the athletic zeitgeist of the current generation.
Everyone is on the go in this day and age. The day almost all of us have the most free time is on Sunday, which is when the NFL is in action.
Following baseball every day, watching with NFL Sunday intensity, is akin to watching every single one of the ongoing Republican debates leading all the way up to the primary elections … only way worse and even more time consuming Well, depending on how you opine with respect to Michele Bachmann. Or politics in general, that is.
Baseball was enthralling when computers didn't sit on your lap. Baseball was engaging when things like smart phones didn't exist. Baseball was electrifying when multitasking and mass consumption of information wasn't as prevalent in society. Then all that stuff happened, existed and took shape. Then baseball's steroid era rolled in. Stop the bleeding!
But you can't, because baseball is too boring. It's slow! If football is high-speed Internet, baseball is dial-up. Football gives fans something to look forward to every week without consuming their time on a daily basis. In fact, one could argue, in a Nick Naylor sort of way, that the reason America is not more civically active is because it spends too much time planted on the couch, watching its throwback bat-and-ball sport that everyone loves.
Sure, that's dramatic, but in the NFL, college football, you name it, every single game matters. Out of 162 games in the MLB ... what happened in game 46? No one cares.
The reluctance to accept football as America's top sport seems to relate to the state of the media today. Established, veteran journalists will preach about objectivity, the way things used to be, how to be as succinct, rigid and structured as possible, and frequently pull a pseudo copout move whenever something like, say, "the future of journalism," is mentioned.
Technology is exploding with emergence of new ways to create media, but most respected people in the field drone the same old, 30-year-old song. The point is, sometimes things get dated and it's no one's fault. What's more interesting to more people today, The New York Times getting their facts straight or what just went up on TMZ.com, which could be totally fabricated and false?
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Bleak, isn't it? As for relevance: how about asking the same question 30 years ago? People would probably say, "What's a dot COM?"
Times change! People like it fast! Embrace change, fellow citizens, and I don't mean Barack Obama change!
Are you ready for some football?
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