Yep, and the World Series ratings this year are brutal, despite the inclusion of 2 major market teams. Down 23% from last year.
Baseball is quickly fading into relative obscurity as a sport, and it may need a radical overhaul to remain relevant - beginning with the pace of the game and not allowing so many pitching changes absent of injuries. Not being a cable subscriber, I’ve been thankful that the Series is broadcast on Fox for free, but I suspect that will come to an end whenever the Series contract is up. They’ll probably move everything over to FS1 except for maybe the occasional odd game.
Could ESPN possibly be serious with this 2019 power ranking? Literally every team the Sox just dominated in the 2018 playoffs is ahead of them. I could almost see a case for NY if you assume they’re adding Machado or Harper, but I don’t know that you can assume Houston changes and you definitely can’t assume LA’s roster will improve.
I recorded most of the games on my Tivo and watched them the next morning. Tivo has a 30-second skip button. I would press it whenever someone fouled off a pitch and I never missed a pitch. There were times when I pressed it two or three times between pitches as either the pitcher stepped off the rubber or the batter stepped out of the box. They need to make the batters stay in the box (penalty for stepping out is a called strike) and the pitchers throw a pitch within 20 seconds (penalty is a called ball). No mound visits from the catcher or other fielders unless a coach also comes out. The players will adjust to the new rules by the end of spring training.
Could be done by imposing a cost to pitching changes (beyond some free allowance) that happen during an inning: first one costs a couple of called balls; subsequent ones result in an automatic walk.
I’m not sure whether it’s fair to judge the obscurity of baseball by the ratings of a particular year’s World Series. Nor whether things like frequency of pitching changes during the World Series are typical of regular-season games.
There already is a cost to pitching changes: you don’t have as many pitchers left in reserve for when the game goes into the 18th inning. (There’s also a plus: more breaks during which the channel broadcasting the game can air more commercials and make more money.)
Last year’s World Series was a 7-game affair that was back and forth the entire time. A series that goes 6 or 7 games gets a huge ratings boost down the stretch.
I had the terrible luck to be visiting the East Coast this weekend, meaning that I missed watching the end of a WS game for the first time in quite a few years.
I flew to Baltimore on Friday, and had to be up early for a conference on Saturday morning. I managed to watch until the end of the 13th inning before I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, especially knowing that I had an early start. The first thing I did when I woke up the next morning was grab my phone and see who had won and how long the game had taken. There’s no way I could have made it through the full 18 innings.
The playoffs is one time when it really does pay to live on the West Coast, because the insistence on starting the games late, and the fact that playoff games tend to be longer anyway, means that people living in California don’t have to stay up until an ungodly hour just to watch the game.
The Red Sox were just the better team throughout the season, and throughout the playoffs. I still don’t think that “manufacturing runs” had very much to do with that. I thought it was quite amusing that the four runs they scored to tie up Game 4, and all of their runs in Game 5, came from homers. They’re just a great hitting club, and they got some outstanding pitching as well. It’s also really fun to watch them play, and I really like some of the players.
I do worry that they’re good enough to put together a few dominating seasons, although that might, at last, get some Red Sox fans to stop whining that they’re somehow still the plucky underdogs fighting against the big-spending Yankees machine. Whatever happens, I’m predicting a long miserable spell for us Orioles fans, which will only be made more depressing by the fact that our crappy team has to play against two of baseball’s most annoying fanbases 36 times a year.
MLB is the second biggest professional sports league on the planet, way ahead of third place. Attendance remains quite high. 2018 was a poor year as compared to 2017, but “relative obscurity” is absurd.
The pace of play can absolutely be improved, though MLB is unwilling to do several key things that would do that… but if it’s going to plateau in popularity, it just is. I’m not sure much can be done about that.
Further expansion would help if they could find some willing billionaires in some prime markets.
It depends on how you define what “big” means. I see a sports league as a business so I measure success by revenue. Looking at 2017, here is the revenue for the 3 big sports leagues in the US:
NFL: $14 Billion
MLB: $10 Billion
NBA: $7 Billion
By that measure, yes MLB is still big (and doing well, 2017 was the biggest ever).
Living on the east coast will kill your sports viewing libido. I miss the days of living in Central Coast and South Bay California and watching football while eating breakfast. I don’t miss the high cost of real estate.
Just a quick note to Dodgers nation: think about jumping on the trade Kershaw bandwagon. Easily your best, most consistent pitcher the last 30-35 years. You trade him because he somehow doesn’t live up to expectations during post-season, but let’s not forget that this guy is easily responsible for 20-30 wins during the regular season, without which, Dodgers don’t even sniff the playoffs. Put that guy in black and orange (SF Giants) and he will appear in your nightmares.
ETA: Holy shit! Imagine Mad-bum and Kershaw…with Posey calling pitches.
For most of us Bostonians, the fact that the Sox have the biggest payroll in MLB makes it pretty hard to view the team as plucky underdogs. To everyone outside the northeast, there’s almost no difference between the Sox and Yankees, or their fans.
That would be somewhat ironic, seeing as the reason Kershaw wears #22 on his jersey is because Kershaw’s favorite player when he was a child was Will ‘The Thrill” Clark.
You are getting rather absurdly carried away here. No one is responsible for 20 wins a year.
But of course the Dodgers should keep him.
The irony of people complaining he can’t pitch in the playoff is they said the same thing about David Price and he pitched brilliantly in the World Series this year. You’d think people would notice that, hey, this other big leftie I said was a permanent choker, as it turns out, wasn’t, so maybe my assumptions were off… and Kershaw has pitched way better in the playoffs than Price had prior to this year.
