Peter Handrinos - Errors and Fouls: Inside Baseballs Ninety-Nie Most Popular Myths

ERRORS and FOULS

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Inside Baseballs Ninety-Nine Most Popular Myths

PETER HANDRINOS

Copyright 2013 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved
Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handrinos, Peter.

Errors and fouls : inside baseballs ninety-nine most popular myths / Peter Handrinos.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61234-560-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-61234-561-1 (electronic)

1. BaseballMiscellanea. I. Title.

GV873.H264 2013
796.357dc23

2012047590

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

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Baseball likes to think of itselfindeed bills itselfas the national pastime but that time is long gone, a distant memory.

JIM DONALDSON, Football, Not Baseball, Is the True National Pastime, Providence Journal, November 3, 2009

For at least 20 years football has had unquestioned supremacy among Americas major spectator sports.

ANDREW OHEHIR, Footballs Death Spiral, Salon.com, February 3, 2013

One of the most mystifying myths in sports has football surpassing baseball as Americas favorite pro team sport.

Its not hard to find claims about the new national pastime. Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, and the Washington Post have described how baseball has been displaced from the top spot. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has mourned the games slippage. The Boston Herald has bought into the hype. So has the Texas Monthly. As has the Christian Science Monitor along with the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Denver Post. Almost every publication this side of Ladies Home Journal has jumped aboard the bandwagon.

Footballs edge over baseball is apparently so obvious that it requires little in the way of supporting evidence. Thats a curious omission but, as it turns out, a necessary one, because the more you contemplate the pro-football view, the more it fades away.

Sports fans vote by turnstile, and the National Football Leagues boosters certainly cannot point to unsurpassed attendance feats. In a typical year like 2011, NFL teams combine for an annual gate of about 16.6 million, while Major League Baseball clubs combine to welcome more than 73.5 million spectators; if popularity is to be measured in the time and energy devoted to live sporting events, baseball is more than four times more popular than football.

At this point NFL teams are routinely outdrawn by MLB teams within markets shared by both sports, and the contrast filters down to the Minor Leagues as well. Pro football attendance was less than half of overall Minors attendance in 2011, when the latter drew 48.1 million spectators, and no less than ten Minor League clubs outdrew NFL franchises from coast to coast, including those located in shared metro areas like Indianapolis and Buffalo.

Fans who vote with their feet have rendered landslide victories for baseball, but some commentators look away from the salient facts. Some say that baseballs popularity as a live draw can be explained away by relatively low prices and high levels of content.

The average MLB ticket is an estimated one-third the price of a typical NFL ticket and the formers regular season encompasses nearly ten times as many games, but affordable prices and vast seating inventories are virtues rather than vices, and only one sport is uniquely capable of translating them into colossal popularity. After all, its conceivable that soccer, lacrosse, or the Hunger Games could draw tens of millions of annual spectators. Assuming a 162-game NFL season didnt lead to the incredibly violent death of every single athlete involved, pro football could elevate its attendance totals several times over. Such notions are ridiculous, of course, because only the authentic pastime has both the beloved status and accommodating structure needed to draw so many people to so many contests.

Football partisans tend to ignore the one-sided attendance metrics, instead asserting that that the gridiron is the greatest draw among in on-air sports. The NFL does typically post 10.0 national ratings that blow away the pastimes 2.6 average on Fox Sports, which would be impressive but for two qualifiers.

First, most baseball fans feel no urgent need to view national broadcasts that can feature clubs based hundreds of miles away. Rather, they usually take rooting interests in local teams, first and foremost. (The national pastime is a very local phenomenon in that way.) To measure the baseballs popularity in terms of national broadcasts is to measure it in largely irrelevant terms.

Second, focusing on individual, one-game-per-week ratings misreads the basis of the pastimes appeal. Even as they march on from March into October, ball clubs can attract an unmatched interest in the day to day, week to week, and month to month. Broadcasts for teams like the Red Sox, Mariners, and Cardinals have been viewed by more than 100,000 households per game for over 100 broadcasts per year.

All of these audiences count, too, and they can accumulate a viewership of hundreds of millions per year, a total far greater than that of the NFL. Baseballs edge explains why the new millennium has seen television revenue records not only for the Majors as a whole but also for pastime teams located in supposedly football-first markets like Dallas and smaller baseball towns like San Diego.

Now that everythings been cleared up

What was that?

A greater than four-to-one attendance advantage isnt impressive enough?

A huge advantage in overall TV views isnt a big deal? All right, fine. In the interests of balance, it should be said that some popularity measures do favor the NFL.

The NFLs annual revenues can outpace MLB dollars by a billion dollars or more, for instance, mostly because the football owners act as a cartel in licensing tchotchkes like coffee mugs, towels, and miniature helmet-phones. This is important to those who love tchotchkes. The NFL also draws far more gambling money than baseball; this is relevant to those who care about big bets. The NFL also leads in video game sales; among dedicated gamers, this means that football has surpassed baseball and that, maybe, Sonic the Hedgehog has replaced the eagle as our national emblem.

The NFL is undoubtedly the most popular sports business in the United States, but theres a different perspective for those interested in more than money. Among the faithful, Americas favorite sport is defined by unmatched holds on our countrys crowds and communications, and they might invite those seeking a new national pastime to look for a new nation.