Basketball games can have hundreds of points but it’s still boring to watch until the last few minutes. It’s just back and forth and back and forth with a bunch of fouls inbetween. Heck, the fouls make it more interesting! Often in basketball it’s how the points DON’T get scored that is interesting.
I went to the last Indians home game this year on a cold night, to see my very last place team play, the day their manager was fired. The game took exactly 2 hours and we lost 1-0. But our pitcher, who sucked his last few outings, pitched an entire game AND had TWELVE strikeouts. That was exciting to me as a fan. Probably as exciting as us getting 12 runs.
For any sport, it’s not how many points you score that makes it enjoyable, it’s how you get to the end. If every team is scoring more runs, how is that different than every team scoring fewer runs? One of them has to win. It’s not that exciting to score a run if you know it’s just as easy for the other team to score a run.
If college sports count, NCAA Football is a monster. If you go by tv ratings, it trounces all team sports except the NFL. If you go by fan attendance, it’s probably roughly equivalent to the the NFL, far behind MLB.
Ha! We did the same thing in elementary school. My dad set me straight when I came home and told him I got a “home run” when playing kickball in gym class. He was pretty impressed at first (Actually, just getting a run was pretty impressive for me.)
I’d be interested to hear baseball’s postseason radio numbers as well, since there is a significant group of baseball fans (myself included) who prefer baseball on the radio over baseball on TV. Add us into the postseason numbers.
The more the players think their individual decisions will affect the outcome, the more thinking they’re going to do. You don’t agonize over a craps throw, because you don’t think it will help. You might have a superstition, but those don’t usually take as much time.
Read Keith Hernandez’s baseball book and you’ll see that even a first baseman was extremely aware of the count, the runners, the pitcher’s current mentality and history, and on and on. “It’s a 1-2 count, so the pitch probably doesn’t have to be that good, but if it’s slowed down too much it’s more likely to be pulled hard, and that’s a quick runner on second in scoring position, but this guy’s kind of a sucker for the curve when he’s nervous, but he’s seen my curve six times today…”
This isn’t really consistent with the recent history of stadium construction. Stadia are being built will reasonably deep fences and, in a lot of cases, very strange angles and configurations that are easy to lose a ball in.
One of the reasons triples are down is that outfielders are better. There aren’t a lot of really bad outfielders anymore, and you don’t see relay throws missed very often. It’s hard to hit a triple against today’s major league outfielders, even in a big park. And in an era where teams are doing a better job of using the numbers to their advantage, the fact that getting thrown out taking an extra base is a huge disadvantage is making teams more conservative on hte basepaths.
If you were to expand outfields you might get more triples, but don’t assume everything would work out the way you expect; as in all sports you may run into unintended consequences. Bigger outfields across the board would result in teams putting more value in fast outfielders and playing them further back; they’d also cause more fly balls to die in the gloves of outfielders, making power hitters slightly less valuable and slap hitters slightly more valuable. So what you might see is an upward blip in triples but an eventual slide into lower a higher percentage of singles as hitters try to hit fewer fly balls.
Not disagreeing with anything you say, tho I quibble about the fences being “reasonably” deep, as there’s been nothing built like old Forbes Field in decades, and at least one of the ballparks with deeper fences, Royals’ Stadium, moved theirs in several years ago. Heck nobody’s really approached Royals’ original dimensions lately (385 alleys, 420 center, as in consistently deep all the way around, not just one quirky outjutting corner like in San Fran). My point was that I’d, just once, like to see one club try it (never suggested that all 30 teams do that); I think a smaller-market team could take advantage of some of those so-called “inefficiences” by doing so. But fans dig the longball I guess.
Fans also like sitting closer to the action. Shorter dimensions and less foul territory mean more pricey seats to sell. I suspect that has a lot more to do with the ways parks are built than selling homers. After all, you’ll get more fans to a winning team that doesn’t hit a lot of homers than a loser that does.