What American sport will decline like boxing and horse racing?

Ummm . . . no

  1. I said many teams can get 1 or 2 seasons BUT you completely dismiss that only a few teams CONSISTANTLY make the playoffs.
    Let’s look at wikipedia. Over the last 15 years:
    1/3 (10 out of 30) of the teams have made the playoffs 2 or fewer times.
    4 teams have made the playoffs over half of those years.
    Half of the teams have been in the champion series zero or one times.

  2. And a baseball game is longer than the Kentucky Derby. Who cares! They’re different sports. And also, does it really matter if baseball times are shorter now if the games were too long to begin with. If games in 2011 are 6 hours long and then in 2012 they are 5:59, would you clain the games weren’t too long because they are shorter now?

Even so Football is on mostly just Sundays and Mondays. With and few Thursdays and occasional Saturday in there (Christmas) this year. And your complaining about a few extra weeks? Baseball is non-stop ever day from April till the end of time. What playoff don’t even start till October right? Then how long do those last? the first round is 5 games 2nd round is 7 games and then the World series is 7 more games and that is for two separate divisions!!! So it takes forever!! Now football it is one day one game and done! Really complaining about 2-3 extra weeks??

*side note I do like and watch baseball but usually not till August /September otherwise I would go crazy!!!

I hear ya. Not only is every single game in the NFL extremely important…every DRIVE has some meaning in the overall picture. When you are a fan of a NFL team…you really are on the edge of your seat almost all the time.

In addition, most teams don’t make the playoffs which means the games have even more meaning.

Of course, the flip of it is that when your team is out, that pretty much is it. (Vikings fan here). However, a longer season allowing them to recover? NO! That would just make each game mean less.

I am going to make a more ambitious (and probably wrong) answer to the OP. I think the current Organized Sports as a whole will decline.

Over the course of my life I feel less connection to ‘the home team’. Players seem to wander all over the U.S. Teams threaten to move every year. Much of the ‘home teams’ don’t really feel that way to me anymore…more like just some business. I look at my kids and their friends and they are not very interested in the big sports.

I keep waiting for some homegrown threat to the Current big 4 sports comes out…one that cultivates the ‘home team’ much more. Hasn’t happened though.

This is one of my biggest problems with the pro sports, and my wife’s head nearly explodes every time I mention it. But I tell her: what sense of “home team” do you have when none of the players are actually from your home town? Some of them don’t even live in the same region as their team. I worked in accounting for a luxury pool builder awhile back, and we built a pool right here in the Phoenix Valley for some guy who played for the Minnesota Twins!

Another problem is, what if you’re a Mets guy, say, and you HATE the Yankees. Furthermore, there is one particular Yankee, Sammy Slugger, who absolutely BOILS YOUR BLOOD. You hate him so much that all you wish for every time he goes up to the plate is for him to get beaned in the nuts and then shit on by a flock of flu-addled birds. You’re on the edge of your seat thinking, “this will be the time it finally happens.” (Don’t try to tell me it’s uncommon to hate a player this much, because I have eyes and ears and I live in America). So next year, Sammy Slugger’s contract happens to come up, and he gets traded to . . . the Mets.

What then?

This is another Favre comment…isn’t it? :smiley:

:confused:

It’s been a long, long time since the majority of players came from the same area as their pro team. Look at the 1927 “Murderer’s Row” Yankees, for example. You’re probably thinking, hey, Lou Gehrig was from NYC, it was a team full of New Yorkers. Nuh-uh. Of their other seven starters in the field, three (Lazzieri, Koenig, and Meusel) were from California, Pat Collins was from Missouri, Joe Dugan was from Mahanoy City, PA, Earle Combs was from rural Kentucky, and Babe Ruth was of course from Baltimore. Pitcher Waite Hoyt was from Brooklyn, but the other four main pitchers came from California, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Ohio. And the '27 Yankees were the rule in the old days.

Hell, think of the most famous names in old-time baseball, even the guys who played their entire careers for one team. Ty Cobb played his whole career in Detroit, but he grew up in Georgia. Ted Williams played his whole career in Boston, but he grew up in California. Etc., etc., etc.

I’m curious what league you think has a better record in this regard? How many teams do you think have been in the NBA finals over the last 15 years? 16 out of 30. How many have been more than one or fewer times? 23 out of 30 (77%).

Hell, the Western Conference champion has been either the Spurs or the Lakers for 10 of the last 11 years… and this is in a league with a salary cap! A salary cap does very little to promote long-term parity.

The point isn’t that MLB games are shorter than they used to be. It’s that they are shorter than NFL games. One can’t honestly argue that the NFL is better because MLB games are too long when MLB games are in fact shorter than NFL games…

While Duke has already pointed out that “the home team” hasn’t meant players from the area in a long time, there’s also the matter that most players aren’t hated like this.

Aside from Roger Clemens, there’s not a Yankee I can think of from the last ten years that caused that level of hate in me. Most of my anti-Yankees rage is against their asshole fans (present company excluded).

While you may not like this, it doesn’t really go to the question the OP is asking. If players not being from the home town or getting moved around was going to cause the decline of baseball, well, why didn’t it cause it before you were born? Major league teams have never been largely comprised of home town players.

In a manner of speaking.

So now it’s twice that someone has strawmaned my arguement. The issue was never about championships but playoffs. Answer your own question by looking at how many different teams consistantly make THE PLAYOFFS in the NBA.

And again the apples and oranges issue over MLB vs NFL timewise. Ifso, then a horserace is the second greatest sport ever behing only the sprints in a track meet.

There is more going on in an NFL game to fill the time than there is in an MLB game. Even though both only have 10-12 minutes of actual action per game, the NFL 10-12 minutes is way more jam-packed with stuff to watch. For example, the pass rush versus the route running. It’d be like having base runners attempting to steal a base every single pitch. There’s just more going on.


Baseball does not have parity. Apologists argue meaningless stats all the time like “# of different teams to make the playoffs / win it all” and then compare that to other leagues. This is meaningless. The true measure of parity is to list each franchise’s payroll at the start of the season in order on opening day, then look at the playoff teams for that year. The vast majority come from the top half in payroll every year like clockwork. Sure there are a few outliers every season, but they aren’t the same outliers.

I last checked this in like 2007. Anyone wanna check how the 2010 opening day payrolls got represented in the 2010 playoffs? I bet it’s highly predictive…


One could argue that pitching is both more highly specialized and more important than any one position in the other sports. If that’s true, it’s possible that baseball could have diluted pitching while, say, basketball doesn’t suffer a similar impact from having a similarly diluted pool of, I don’t know, point guards? I don’t know if this is actually true; just offering a guess at a possible rationalization for the idea.

Ask and ye shall receive…

American League
Tampa Bay Rays - #21
Texas Rangers - #27
Minnesota Twins - #11
New York Yankees - #1

National League
Philadelphia Phillies - #4
Cinncinati Red - #19
San Francisco Giants - #10
Atlanta Braves - #15

I don’t think that proves what you wanted it to prove.

I wonder if its more of a lack of “characters” playing the sport any more. You know, guys like Ilie Nastasie, Jimmy Connors, Borg and his hair, McEnroe, etc.

5 of 8 were in the top half of payrolls. When was the last time it was .500 or lower?

The rivalry between Nadal and Federer alone should be sufficient.

What you’re asking for isn’t realistic at all.

But the average position of each team’s payroll is 13.5, that’s the very definition of parity and the “anyone can win it all” spirit.

Where did you get these numbers? You sure they’re opening day payrolls? This site says:

American League
Tampa Bay Rays - #19
Texas Rangers - #27
Minnesota Twins - #10
New York Yankees - #1

National League
Philadelphia Phillies - #4
Cinncinati Red - #20
San Francisco Giants - #9
Atlanta Braves - #15

Note that the numbers are basically the same, just switched around.

2010: 50% in top 10 (1, 4, 9, 10, 15, 19, 20, 27)
2009: 63% in top 10 (1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 17, 18, 24)
2008: 63% in top 10 (3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 16, 25)
2007: 50% in top 10 (1, 2, 4, 8, 13, 23, 25, 26)
2006: 38% in top 10 (1, 5, 6, 11, 14, 17, 19, 21)
2005: 63% in top 10 (1, 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 16)
2004: 75% in top 10 (1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 12, 19)
2003: 50% in top 10 (1, 3, 6, 9, 11, 18, 23, 25)

(Note: I couldn’t get ODP for seasons before 2008, so I had to just use total payroll for 2007 and earlier.)

[ul][li]In 6 of the past 7 years, at least half the playoff spots went to teams with a top 10 payroll.[/li][li]The average payroll rank for all playoff teams is 12.30, which is much better than I expected. (Tampa Bay helped the cause here, as did one other team. I forget if it was Minnesota or San Diego([/li][li]Of the 56 total playoff spots, 36 (64%) went to top 10 payroll teams[/li][li]Of the 56 total playoff spots in the last 7 years, 45 (80%) went to teams in the top half of payroll rank. Only 20% went to teams in the bottom half of payroll.[/ul][/li]
(There is no particular reason I stopped at 7 years. I just got bored.)

Definitely. It was an AP report that was pretty widely published. (http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/story/13162308/-baseball-payrolls-list)

As for the previous years you dug up, I still say that proves that parity is alive and well in the MLB. Aside from the Yankees buying a playoff spot every year (although, let’s be fair, they’ve built some amazing homegrown talent in the last decade), it’s more or less a free-for-all.

I would certainly hope that the teams with higher payrolls made the playoffs more often. If they didn’t what would the point of spending money be? What you of course are missing, outside a few big markets, that it isn’t the same teams spending money every year. It isn’t just that that teams that spend more are in contention, but also that teams that believe they will be in contention will spend more. There is a much bigger financial boon from going from 85 to 90 wins than 65 to 70. Minnesota and St. Louis aren’t big market teams and Houston and Baltimore aren’t mid to small markets. Their spending reflects where their team’s life cycle, not their ability to compete in the market they are in.

Getting back to the object of this thread, if non-parity in baseball is going to lead to its decline to have to show 3 things.

  1. Parity in baseball is less now than it has been in the past.

  2. Parity in baseball is less than in other sports.

  3. Parity is good for a sports success.

So far I see none of those things displayed.