You can be flashy and still earn the respect of players and fans alike. I think Rickey Henderson embodied the flashy, entertaining style of baseball but you could tell he genuinely loved the game. Rickey was a once in a lifetime player, though.
Looking back at the most memorable celebrations of home runs, a couple come to mind. Carlton Fisk waving the ball fair and Kirk Gibson pumping his fists around the bases. I don’t recall either of them catching any hell for showboating. I think the biggest thing that pisses off pitchers is the stand-and-stare. But it goes both ways. I remember players didn’t like Dennis Eckersly shouting and fist pumping after striking out batters, too.
Bottom line, if you think baseball isn’t flashy enough then it’s probably not the game for you.
In the 1992 ALCS, Eckersley was much given to fist pumping and arm swinging when he struck guys out. The Blue Jays took great offense to this.
Then in Game 4, Roberto Alomar hit a ninth inning homer off Eckersley that completed the A’s blowing a five-run lead and, in effect, the whole series. Alomar celebrated the home run quite openly, and the A’s took offense to THAT.
Why both teams didn’t maybe just say “if I don’t want the other guy celebrating I shouldn’t give him reason to celebrate” I don’t quite understand.
Oh… You are right. Because when he talked about the average baseball fan being a 53 year old white guy, and the fan base is dying, and black America defines what is “hip” and “cool” in our culture, and baseball is losing the black fan base (hell, MLB has LOST the black fan) he wasn’t talking about race or color. :dubious:
Wasn’t Rock saying that baseball needs to become “hip” before it’s too late? What do you think he was saying?
Why did Rock talk about the percentage of black players in baseball if race isn’t a part of it? What difference does it make? As you point out, an NBA crowd has a large white fan base. I never said the NBA didn’t. YOU connected those dots. A white kid can put up a poster of his favorite (most likely black) player on his wall… So why can’t a black kid put up his favorite white or hispanic player? Since when is the color of a player relevant to whether that race follows the sport?
As for Rock being a stealth racist, those again, are your words. I never called Rock a racist. I said his baseball rant was. And no, I wasn’t sitting in the audience for the routine you mentioned. However, I have seen Rock do bits in front of a majority white audience, as well as a majority black audience. If you have, you would know he has a different delivery style for each. He targets his act to his audience, a very smart thing to do. Again, that doesn’t make the man a racist, it makes him smart.
As to what “White Men Can’t Jump”… I don’t know. White men, in general CAN’T jump, (not high, anyway). It is a white stereotype. What that has to do with this discussion, I have no idea.
Who said he wasn’t talking about race? You can talk about race and not be a racist. Lots of people do it amazingly enough! Even Chris Rock! :eek:
What exactly do you think “The Great White Hope” is about? People tend to like players that look like them. We may not like it, but it is generally the case. You mentioned Clemente - he’s considered a hero to black and hispanic folks. If you think that’s only because he was a good player, I have a bridge to sell you. Though the lack of black baseball players may be the result of lack of African-American interest in the sport, rather than the cause. It’s somewhat chicken and the egg - but the lack of interest in baseball among younger and minority demographics compared to other sports is something that can be seen and charted and is worrisome.
As I’ve suggested before, I think that the MLB should change the geometry of the field (height of the pitcher’s mound, distance from the mound to the pitcher, distance between plates, etc.) so that, on average, each person who goes to bat has a 50/50 chance of making it home. >67% of the time, during a game of baseball, no actual baseball takes place. A person goes to bat and then goes back to the box. And that’s all they’ve accomplished. The majority of the team, out in the field, have done nothing but scratch their butts.
The interesting part of baseball is watching if the team in the field can handle the batter and the runners at the same time, whether the runner can steal, whether the pitcher can catch a runner off-guard when he’s preparing to steal, etc. All of this tactical action is what makes the game interesting and yet it almost never happens. The players are all amazingly talented, and yet we rarely get to see any of them actually do what they are trained to do. They’re playing a team-based game and yet we rarely see any actual teamwork.
Lletting the guys get outrageous tattoos, do backflips out in the field, and so on might attract a slightly larger number of young-uns to develop an interest in the game. But just fixing a design hole that’s been institutionalized instead of corrected would almost certainly do a lot more across all age groups. Watching baseball players actually play the full game could only ever be more satisfying to people who already or might come to like the game, so it’s silly not to do it.
Chase Field, home of the Diamondbacks, has a promotion like that. I don’t know if that’s the exact one that was being referred to, but it certainly exists. They also let kids run the bases, and do other family promotions like Father/Daughter night, bark in the park(bring your dog, and so on.
What you are saying is logically equivalent to saying that cricket could be improved by removing the bats and the wickets, increasing the size of the ball, making the pitch rectangular, and having the payers try to kick the ball into opposite goals. After all, soccer’s even more popular than cricket!
There is no evidence baseball has a problem with popularity. The assumption appear to be being made - as in fact it has been made since before I was born - that there are no new baseball fans and it’s waning. It simply isn’t. Major League Baseball is the most-attended professional sports league in the history of sports, and attendance has been at its highest levels over the last few decades. Even with the 1994 strike and the Great Recession, MLB has fans pouring into the parks and laying out more money than ever. So far 2015 is off to best attendance start ever.
Completely changing the nature of the sport makes no sense at all. People LOVE baseball; what you’re describing would not be baseball and so would risk losing all those fans.
If you think the most interesting part of baseball is the interaction between the fielders and the runners (and that the only way the batter becomes interesting is how he impacts the running game)… I don’t even know what to say, that’s such a bizarre notion.
I mean, people often oversimplify baseball as a 2-man duel between the pitcher and the batter, and that’s* also *wrong, but at least I can sort of see the point there. Baseball boiled down to its bare minimum would be a guy throwing a ball and another guy hitting it with a stick. Baserunning, steals, double plays, and pickoff throws are fun and all (well, maybe not the last one so much), but I’ve never heard anyone say that’s the *primary reason *they watch the game. You seem to believe that baseball is some weird combination of team tag and a relay race. Would you also say that home runs aren’t an interesting part of the game? After all, those don’t involve anyone on the field other than the pitcher and the batter, either.
In and of itself, I don’t care much about the bells and whistles that various pro sports teams add to try to make the game more fun for audiences they hope to attract.
I’m a 54 year old white guy. I’M not part of the crowd sports leagues are hoping to attract. They figure they have my attention already, and I’m no longer a desirable viewer from their advertisers’ point of view anyway. Major League Baseball wants my SON and his friendswatching, not me! If they figure playing more current pop/hip hop music at the stadium will make the whole ballpark experience more fun for them, I can understand that. It really doesn’t bother me a bit if they play “Turn Down For What” between innings.
But EVENTUALLY, the game itself is what matters. And if you have a problem with the game itself, there’s only so much anyone can do to make it more entertaining. My son finds MOST spectator sports boring- he’d rather be outside skating or riding his bike than watching other people play sports. Maybe that will change one day, but for now, there’s almost nothing MLB (or the NFL or NBA,) can do to turn my son into a fan.
I’m all for speeding up baseball, but even if the pace were just what I wanted it to be, the game would still last roughly two and a half hours, and it would still be too slow to suit some people. Baseball isn’t basketball, and it’s not SUPPOSED to be. There isn’t SUPPOSED to be constant action.
If Chris Rock’s friends just find the game dull, they aren’t going to come to watch the Mets just because they’re playing more rap songs on the speakers between innings. And more high-fives after homers won’t make the game more thrilling to black kids.
One other thought- Chris Rock complains that there’s too much tradition in baseball, that black people have bad memories of the past and don’t embrace tradition the way white people do.
Well, NO sport is more caught up in tradition than college football, and black sports fans as a whole loooove college football.
In this regard Rock is completely talking out of his ass. “Tradition” is one of those things that really doesn’t mean anything objective, and which is usually a cart placed before a horse. If people like baseball, they learn the history and tradition. If they don’t, they won’t. Telling people the stories of Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio will not make them baseball fans. They become interested in them because they are interested in baseball.
If black people were interested in things inversely proportional to their level of “tradition” then by any rational analysis they should be losing interest in basketball and embracing Ultimate Fighting by the millions, since it’s basically all flash and no tradition, whereas basketball has a long history now.
Well, as someone who grew up in an old NL city (Houston), and moved to an AL town, I can honestly say that I found AL ball boring as shit in comparison to the NL game. All they seemed to do was try and get on base and/or swing for the fences. Very few stolen bases, not much aggressive base running, and no hit-and-runs.
Essentially it’s small-ball vs. big-inning style of play, but if you’re raised on small ball, big-inning seems boring.
When it comes to tradition, it’s unrealistic to expect Rock and other black fans to embrace the pre-segregation era. A lot of white fans revere, and are nostalgic for, the time when baseball was the National Pastime. Field of Dreams. The Babe. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks. Throw back day at the old ballgame has an entirely different meaning for black fans. I don’t think white fans are being racist when they get misty-eyed about Ty Cobb, Murderers Row and the Gashouse Gang, but those baseball traditions are exclusive.
One the other hand, MLB has gone completely overboard on Jackie Robinson. It’s great that he is acknowleded, but enough already.
Indeed the question is which tradition is being highlighted. I don’t see all that much of a movement to build stadiums that look like they were built in the 1930s or a focus on players who were big in the days of segregation. In addition, universities are pretty varied - while SEC teams were segregated well into the 60s, northern and western teams broke that barrier earlier.
I do think the over reliance on Jackie Robinson (and no one says anything about poor Larry Doby or other folks who came over in the early years of integration) is a conscious acknowledgement about baseball that it may sometimes go overboard on the pre-integration white tradition and is trying to compensate.
My goodness, changing the geometry, playing fewer innings? I can’t see how any of this improves baseball. The thing is, if you’re a baseball fan you don’t need any changes. If you’re not a baseball fan, there’s probably no change that would draw you in.
Well, as a baseball fan, I can think of one. Get rid of the DH. It lengthens the games and removes the strategy. That said, I rarely watch much baseball these days. It’s hard to watch any team, much less your favorite, if all you have available is the national broadcasts unless you happen to be a Red Sox or Yankees fan. For that matter, the problem with the pace of games these days is that even a game in April is played like it’s October. It’s even worse if it happens to actually be a Red Sox-Yankees game. In addition, baseball is poor to watch on TV due to the limitations of the camera (and the announcers apparent need to talk about everything but what’s actually going on) and I learned long ago that I can’t both listen anything that requires active attention (including a baseball radio call) and do something else that requires concentration (even if it’s just being on the internet or playing a game that doesn’t require audio.)
I’m thinking I might start going to AAA games again once I move and the minors can definitely have their own charms. Still, though, even those have gone way up in price since I was a kid and you could get a family of four into the stadium for $10 total, bring your own food and drinks, and still get something at the game and be out less than $20 or $30 total.