I am an Australian, and understand that the ‘tier one’ sports in the US are baseball, basketball and football. I also understand that college football and basketball are enormously popular (I am reading “I am Charlotte Simmons” at the moment).
Why doesn’t college baseball seem to have the same level of popularity as the other two? Do good baseball players generally go straight to the major league rather than developing through the college system, or is there another reason?
The main problem with college baseball is that baseball is a summer sport, and colleges are out of session in the summer. That more or less limits the competition to schools in the south and on the southern coasts, where it is rather popular, but on a much smaller scale than football or basketball.
In order to get a full season in, college baseball starts in February in the south, when half of the country is still seeing snow and freezing temperatures.
Although many of the best players go professional out of high school (in the minor league system), there has been a huge improvement in certain college baseball programs such that there isn’t as much of a difference in development of players in college vs. the minor leagues. Many of the best players in the game, especially pitchers, come from college programs. This was rarely true 20 years ago.
Football and Basketball started as college games. They were games for college boys to compete, show their guts, become men, etc. then go on with their lives as doctors or engineers or such. The professional leagues came much later, and started very slowly, with much ridicule.
Baseball started outside college. It was an entertainment form in nearly any city of size, and started out professional(though very low paying). Young or unproven players would play in the town that they worked a normal job and lived in. If they turned out to be good, a better team from a bigger city might offer them more money to play for them. Then up again and so on. It’s called the farm system, and at one point some major league teams had 50 farm teams supplying players to them. Eventually TV and radio and whatnot changed the society so people didn’t go down to the local ballpark out of sheer boredom, and the number of teams dwindled drastically. Now each team has maybe 4 farm teams, along with a few independant leagues. But the main road to the pros never got around to changing. A career minor leaguer can make $24,000 in AA ball, so many kids think that, plus a minuscule chance at getting rich in the majors, is worth all their effort. College baseball is a split effort between studying and baseball, with most of the players just having fun and getting a scholarship, knowing they don’t really have a hope of playing past college. There are exceptions of course, more and more. Some very good players do go so they have a backup degree in case something happens and they are unable to ever play hig level professional.
I don’t like it ping because of the ping aluminum bats.
Personally, I love college baseball. The atmosphere at a college game is great. You are right next to the action. back in the 80’s and 90’s, Miss St really had a big following, and I went to several games a year.
But as someone above pointed, Baseball started as a professional game, whereas B-ball and Football started as college games.
Do basketball and football have minor leagues/reserve grade of any note?
Yes. The Big 10, Pac 10, SEC, ACC, Big East etc.
(These are college athletic conferences)
No, not like baseball, or hockey for that matter. There is a basketball development league, and there used to be the CBA. There’s another league independent of the NFL called the UNGL but I’m not sure it could be called a real league at this point. The NFL used to run a league in Europe but that died a few years ago.
One of the reasons behind NFL Europe(World league of American Football) was to provide a training-seasoning environment for the True NFL. Many of the players, particularly QBs were on contract to NFL teams, but were the 3rd or 4th QB and were never going to get to play here, but might get better playing actual games against good competition. But I honestly can’t think of one who ever made it, which might be part of the reason it’s dead.
Baseball players don’t go directly from high school to the major leagues - they either go to the minor leagues or college. College players who want to play professionally also go to the minors when they’re done with school. So the best players who aren’t in the majors are mostly in the minors, not in college. This is very different from football and basketball, which have no minor leagues to siphon off talent from the colleges. The lower level of talent tends to reduce people’s interest.
There are a few colleges that have good baseball programs where the sport is a big deal - Stanford and Arizona State, for example.
Jake Delhomme, Kurt Warner and Adam Vinatieri for starters.
Everything posted in this thread is correct and true, but far and away the most serious issue with college baseball is the existence of minor league baseball. Much of the excitement of College Basketball and Football is built around the development and media promotion of potential future NBA/NFL stars. There’s a reason the draft, combine and pre-draft analysis warrant heavy media coverage in both sports. Both systems are very successful and mutually beneficial.
Developmental baseball however is incredibly diluted. Perhaps too diluted since neither college baseball or most minor league baseball leagues are particularly successful. Baseball is unique in that it’s really the only American sport where players are drafted and developed directly out of high school. It’s more like hockey in that way than either football or basketball. Many great baseball players developed this way, perhaps even most, but there are few who speak glowingly of watching baseball prospects develop. Baseball when played poorly is a chore to watch, basketball and football even when played poorly are fairly entertaining.
It’s also worth noting that professional baseball is an older game than either football or basketball. Professional teams were present in most of America years before the NFL or NBA had expanded into some of the second tier cities and the west coast. Due to that market penetration baseball is simply associated with the MLB. It’s much more of an either/or situation with the other two sports because the college game grew alongside the professional one as opposed to in it’s shadow.
The top tier schools do command a pretty big college baseball following but it doesn’t extend to the big TV contracts and such. That’s another reason a casual sports fan may say “what about college baseball? I never even see it.”
But for those of us who follow a team (for me, it’s LSU), college baseball is a HUGE deal. LSU has won, what? six? College World Series in the past 20 years? That’s amazing. Thier college stadium is larger and nicer than many minor league ballparks. I think LSU consistently sets the NCAA attendance record for college baseball.
Bottom line: there is a very dedicated following but about the only time you’ll see a national broadcast is during the college world series. (But that’s why God invented internet streaming)
Actually, the big-time professional team sports in the U.S. are football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. Hockey has enough teams and enough well paid players that it counts as one of the big-time team sports. Soccer hangs on just below the level of big-time team sports. The players don’t make quite enough and there aren’t quite enough teams for it to be big-time.
(Note: To be exact, baseball and hockey are actually North American team sports, not U.S. team sports. The hockey teams are about half and half U.S. and Canadian in the professional league. For the past couple of decades, there has been one or two Canadian teams in the professional baseball league.)
The players in professional football and basketball in the U.S. nearly always come from U.S. college teams. The players in professional baseball nearly always come from minor-league professional teams. The players in professional hockey nearly always come from Canadian minor-league teams.
The big team sports in U.S. colleges are generally football and basketball. However, baseball and hockey are also quite common. So is soccer. It’s moderately common to find rugby and other team sports there too. There are also lots of teams in sports where the competition is more individual, like track and field (which is called “athletics” in some other English-speaking countries), wrestling, tennis, etc.
Just to make sure we have the facts straight: the NHL is only twenty percent Canadian, having six out of thirty teams in Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.) There was briefly a period where there were eight Canadian teams, but it has been a very, very long time indeed since the league was half Canadian. More than half of the PLAYERS are Canadian, though.
There is one Major League baseball team in Canada, the Toronto Blue Jays, who’ve been around for 33 seasons, and one NBA basketball team, the Toronto Raptors, now playing their 15th season. So while those leagues do have one outpost in Canada’s biggest city (as does Major League Soccer, for those who care) they are American for all practical purposes.
As I said, for the past couple of decades, there have been one or two Canadian teams in professional baseball. Montreal had a team for a while. I apologize for not keeping up with professional hockey. I didn’t realize that the proportion of teams had tipped so far towards American teams.
I suppose that it’s strange on some level that hockey is a professional sport in which the majority of teams are American but the majority of players are Canadian. But then it’s increasingly true that the players in professional baseball don’t come from the U.S. 10% of professional baseball players at the moment come from the Dominican Republic. Others come from other Latin American countries, Japan, and various other places. It’s not a majority of players from outside the U.S., but it’s quite a large proportion. I think that professional football is the closest to getting its players mostly from the U.S. Hockey players mostly come from outside the U.S., a large proportion of baseball players come from outside the U.S., and a significant proportion of basketball players don’t come from the U.S. There aren’t very many football players from outside the U.S. though. In general, just as in many other industries, here in the U.S. we’ve outsourced our athletic development. We let other countries develop athletes and then ship them in for our professional sports.
I disagree. The most serious issue is weather and the calendar.
For the benefit of the OP, who is Australian, the academic year at American universities runs from August or September through May or June. Most universities hold classes during the summer, but only a fraction of the student body remains present so intercollegiate sports aren’t played at that time. Consequently every sport season must start no earlier than late August and end no later than early June.
For baseball, in the northeast and midwest, this is an absolute deal breaker toward building fan interest. I attended the University of Illinois, where the baseball season ran from February through late May. The season would begin with a long road trip (partly over spring break) through the South and Southwest. Long road trips don’t build fan interest. Then the team would come home for a rushed five-week Big Ten season where the majority of the games were played under absolutely miserable (cold and wet) conditions. About the time the playoffs started, the student body would scatter for home.
In other parts of the country (south and west coast) this isn’t a problem, and college baseball is popular. But lots of people still live in the northeast and midwest, so college baseball will never develop a national following (and a big TV contract) like football and basketball.
Even at the high school level, in the Midwest, baseball is nowhere near as big as football or basketball. It’s a consequence of the academic calendar.
It’s not really tipped that far. The early NHL was extremely fluid, but settled in 1942 with the so-called “Original Six” - Toronto, Montreal, Detroit, Chicago, Boston and the New York Rangers. (Though traditionally called the Original Six, in fact only Toronto and Montreal are founding franchises.) So from 1942 to 1966, the NHL was a six-team league with two Canadian franchises.
And then it gets fricking nuts.
The first expansion in 1967 added six more franchises, all American: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Minnesota, and the California Seals. So now we’re down to one-sixth Canadian. (Minnesota eventually became Dallas, and California eventually moved to Cleveland was then absorbed by Minnesota.) Actually, this is where the “Original Six” term came from, because for some reason they put all the new franchises in one division, guaranteeing one of them would make the Stanley Cup Finals.
In 1971 two more; Buffalo and Vancouver. So the NHL is now 3/14ths Canadian.
In 1972 two more American franchises, Atlanta and the New York Islanders. 3/16.
In 1975 Kansas City (later the Colorado Rockies, later the New Jersey Devils) and Washington Capitals are added, so now the league is just 1/6th Canadian, then 3/17ths Canadian when Cleveland dies.
Then in 1979 it gets way more Canadian as the NHL absorbs four new teams from the dead WHA: Edmonton, Winnipeg, Quebec and Hartford. So now the league is 6 Canadian teams out of 21. Then it becomes one third Canadian again, when Atlanta moves to Calgary to become the present-day Calgary Flames.
Expansion begins again in 1991 with San Jose, then the following year Tampa Bay and Ottawa are added. I believe it is at this point that the league is the most Canadian it will ever be; 8 Canadian teams out of 24, the most Canadian franchises and back to one third.
Then the NHL starts adding more teams in bizarre places like Nashville, and two Canadian tams move to the USA, Winnipeg to Phoenix and Quebec to Denver.
So in fact it’s never been more than 1/3 Canadian, except in the very beginning in the 1910s, when it was all Canadian but barely even a pro sports league. That is, of course, still quite a lot - heck, 20% is a lot - when you consider how much smaller the Canadian market is. Three Canadian teams are based in cities (Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa) that are very small by North American pro sports standards.
Thanks, RickJay, I guess I didn’t know very much about professional hockey.
Omniscient writes:
> Professional teams were present in most of America years before the NFL or
> NBA had expanded into some of the second tier cities and the west coast.
Well, we should note that before the 1950’s, professional baseball, football, and basketball were all confined to the part of the U.S. north and east of St. Louis and Kansas City, and professional hockey was confined to an even smaller part of the U.S. with some of Canada added. Until regular airline service was available, the leagues were restricted to an area just large enough that trips between cities could be made by train in one day.
I think one of the bigger issues is how overexposed the MLB is. 30 teams play 162 games. That’s a lot of baseball to be passionate about. The NBA plays 82 with 30 teams, but college basketball only escalates to a true national sport in March. The NFL has 32 teams with a 16 game schedule, so football fans have some enthusiasm to spare. The Saturday/Sunday split also helps.
RickJay:
Excellent recap of NHL history, but just to nitpick (since you were so thorough):
The San Jose team was technically a re-split of the Minnesota absorption.