I know one reason I can’t stand the Yankees is because of ESPN’s constant coverage of them. Not only in their news coverage, but in their Sunday/Monday night baseball games. Almost every game has the Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, or Mets.
OK, I’m well aware that the East Coast teams have a national fan base and many Northeastern/Midwest transplants follow those teams.
Yes, I know that the Eastern time zone has the largest percentage of the US population and a game at 7:00 Eastern starts too early for a lot of viewers in the Mountain and Pacific time zones.
But, does ESPN need some balance? I realize as a network they are in the business to make money and a Red Sox/Yankees game will get better ratings than Pirates/Brewers. Should MLB try to ensure some scheduling fairness like the NFL does?
There are the regional sports networks and most cable/satellite providers offer the MLB extra innings package. But, that is subscription only and is cost prohibitive for a casual fan.
So, is it bad for baseball that a casual fan doesn’t get to see many of the teams? Does it matter that if the Yankees are playing Minnesota that the announcers treat the Twins as if they are the Washington Generals playing the Globetrotters?
That’s a pretty silly and unsupportable statement. MLB attendance has never been higher in the sport’s history, and television viewership is strong. If the fan base has been driven away, who are those people filling the stadia? Confused cricket fans?
Okay, I will give you that it was an argument from outrage a bit, and the financials from last year are strong, especially for those teams that are in a position to spend. Television viewership is strong on a regional game by game basis, but the World Series and All Star game ratings were not good.
My issues with baseball (and I think personal perspective plays into this as well), are the lack of salary cap/ salary parody, the general lack of quality baseball being played due to expansion, and the un-kid friendliness of the game due to later start times.
I really want to like baseball again, but they don’t make it easy.
Later start times (ironically, to capture as many viewers as possible) certainly don’t help, but they’re the nature of the beast, especially in interleague play.
I get to watch my “local” team on the “local” sports network. I say “local” because it’s the Mariners and I live in Portland. Back in '01, ESPN gave the Mariners plenty of coverage, as they were on their way to 116 wins that season. If your team is doing well, ESPN will give your team coverage. If your team sucks, they won’t. Another reason ESPN sucks the Yanks and Sox’s cocks is because they win year in, year out. Other teams, like my M’s, win 116 8 years ago, but suck this year. Also, it gives me another reason to root for my team, as it appears that the world is against them or ignoring them. And it gives me an enemy to root against.
Even though I’m a Cub fan and have the benefit of deep pockets, I think I’d prefer a NFL model for baseball.
In many ways, it’s a chicken and the egg situation. Are the viewership issues with the Pirates, Twins and Royals because they are smaller markets spread over wide areas, or is it because the teams can’t afford to keep any of their talented players and have limited scouting resources? You could make the argument that if there was a hard cap, and if there was a effort to give near-equal time to all the teams we’d eventually see the ratings and fan turnout in those middle-tier cities climbing.
I don’t think fewer fans are going to watch the Yanks, BoSox, Cubs and Mets if they are forced to spend less, so anything that helps bring more people into PNC park helps baseball’s numbers overall.
The alternative argument is that a non-capped or soft cap simply selects the teams in Darwinian fashion and that teams like KC and Pittsburgh should move to find cities that can better support them and allow them to spend more. I think this would be bad for baseball in the long run, but it’s a valid perspective.
I think a hard cap, or perhaps just a hard free agent cap, would force teams to better invest in their recruiting and player development environments. By raising the value of internally developed players you would force the teams to invest in their minor league franchises and to build better youth programs that encourage people to play baseball at a young age to facilitate scouting and broaden the talent pool. This would provide a strong social benefit as it would get more American kids off the couch, and it would create a much stronger fan base amongst minor league franchises which would generally have more Americans in more places watching baseball.
I think the MLB is working to court the corporate dollar by favoring the major markets the way it does. This will line the owners pockets in the short term, but I don’t know that it will trickle down to the mom and pops and present sustainable growth.
Only compared to the one game only Super Bowl. World Series and All-Star games still routinely top the ratings chart.
As for whether this is bad for baseball or not, I’m not entirely convinced they do it. Do the Yankees and Red Sox show up proportionally more than other AL teams? I think so. But how many of those games are because the Yankees or the Red Sox are making a playoff run or are playing another marquee team like the Indians, Angels or Mets in an interleague game.
Does anyone have a list of ESPN’s Sunday night games handy?
I’m a Yankee fan and I think it sucks. I hate the late Sunday games and I hate listening to Joe Morgan.
Honestly, I do think it is bad the way ESPN and FOX show far more of a few teams than the rest. However, they need to make their money back on their contract and unless MLB wants to take less money, I see no reasonable answer.
Whatever other problems baseball might have, quality of play isn’t one of them. The quality of play has never been better.
Expansion has lagged behind talent development and the exploitation of new sources of talent, especially in Asia. In the last thirty years they’ve only added four teams to bring it from 26 teams to 30, hardly a huge expansion, but in that period of time the U.S. population has grown over 35 percent, Caribbean talent has been vastly better scouted and developed and has produced far more ballplayers than it used to, Canadian players have started showing up in greater numbers, and Asia, esp. Japan, has sent over a lot of quality talent.
For how much criticism the NFL announcers get, the national baseball guys are infinitely worse. Joe Morgan, Joe Buck, Tim McCarver, Chris Berman, Jon Miller…so painful and the poorly veiled bias is more annoying than blatant homerism.
With Morgan and Miller it’s the Reds and Giants. They are awful if they are calling a game when those teams are involved, which Cubs games tend to feature often, and they also tend to favor the Dodgers and Padres likely just out of familiarity. Joe Buck and his affection for the Cardinals is painful, for obvious reasons, and as a Cubs fan you can imagine how that works out when we get the 3 or 4 Cubs-Cards games on Fox every year. Berman continues his career as a NY sports honk, painfully biased towards the Yanks and Mets and his general lust for big-name superstars obviously favors the Northeast corridor. Oddly, as a Connecticut native he seems to favor the Yanks over the BoSox. McCarver obviously lusts for Jeter and A-Rod and his Cardinals bias is probably even more intense than Bucks.
It’s so jarring because the ESPN and Fox guys all seem to favor the same 5 teams, so there’s no escaping it. And this is said as a fan of the big market, media darling Cubbies. If I feel like my team gets short-shrift, imagine how the peeps in the rest of the MLB feel.
The old Game of the Week on Saturday afternoon (in the Joe Garagiola days) would also focus on the top teams, as has Monday Night football (the Raiders have very rarely been on since they became crap several years ago).
