In Monday’s New York Times, in her “Sports of the Times” column, Selena Roberts posits that baseball itself is largely culpable for its death as a participation sport in the U.S. She noted that by the time MLB got around to sanctioning the first pitch of an American League playoff game last Saturday night, the American sporting landscape was already abuzz from another Saturday afternoon of upset specials in college football. Worse, Saturday night’s Red Sox-Indians’ tilt ended some time near Sunday morning church-going for millions of Americans.
In catering more to Jay Leno’s demographic, baseball is divorcing itself from the very constituency it needs to perpetuate itself: young athletes. And in so doing, and here’s where Roberts’ argument gets really fun, baseball necessarily has exported many of this nation’s best athletes to another sport — football.
“Only insomniacs, Stephen King and barflies would have seen the Red Sox lose at that hour [Saturday night],” she wrote.
“Only baseball could test the sleep-deprivation limits of its fans in a postseason where every inning feels like the seventh-inning stretch. Only baseball could seem more invisible, more numbing, during the playoffs than it did during the slow-drip cadence of a 162-game season.”
It’s not a terribly terrific idea I don’t think to take a non-contact sport, which derives much its enduring hold on its supporters for its “cerebral” and games-without-clocks appeal, and by virtue of starting games past the bedtimes of millions of American youths, help ensure they can’t form important attachments to it. We’re talking about the sport’s postseason, after all, when heroes and icons typically are birthed.
“This is why college football is reveling in the sweet glory of parity,” Roberts claims. “The decline of baseball as America’s pastime — or past time, as the clock may indicate — has inadvertently seeded football programs across the country with talent.”
“Where are all the skilled athletes going? To the sport they can watch, to the sport that engages their short attention spans and markets to their starry-eyed sensibilities. To football.”
There’s data backing up Roberts’ point. The conspicuous decline in participation by American blacks in baseball is increasingly being documented — the sport’s been obliterated from urban America. (Where are the fields in cities?) But now American blacks are beginning to be joined on the sidelines by another important group: whites.
“In the past 15 years, according to a recent study by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, the percentage of African-American major league baseball players has plunged to 8.4 percent from 18 percent; the percentage of white players has slipped to 59.5 percent from 68 percent.
Now look at Division I football statistics compiled by the N.C.A.A. In the past five years, the percentage of football scholarships offered to African-American players has risen to 45.4 percent in 2005-6 from 39.5 percent in 1999-2000.”
I read Roberts’ remarkable findings and claims and thought back to Labor Day weekend, when Appalachian State stunned much of planet Earth with its compelling slaying of top-5-ranked, powerhouse Michigan. It wasn’t with smoke and mirrors that A State pulled off the feat, it was with quality athletes — all over the field, and especially at the skill positions. Does that kind of upset happen 20 years ago? Of course not; had it, the reaction to this game wouldn’t have been as powerful as it was. And now, virtually every Saturday sends fresh jolts throughout the top 25 rankings. College athletic directors who 5 or 10 years thought they’d scheduled “gimmes” out of conference in 2007 are learning something else.
The vast majority of college football games each Saturday are completed just as baseball’s playoff clubs are leaving their hotels. And so baseball’s wound in the competitive sports marketplace is self-inflicted. Why can’t a postseason first pitch be delivered at 1:05 on a Saturday? Because of baseball’s bloodlust for prime — and past prime — time big bucks.
There’s a cautionary tale here for hockey. The good news is that when a hockey broadcast, regular season or playoff, commences at 7:00 on the East Coast the action starts at 7:05 and pretty much proceeds unabated until 9:30. It’s a kiddie-family friendly schedule. For some mysterious reason baseball broadcasts arrive and viewers are greeted by nearly a half hour of non-action analysis. Then, in its modern iteration, baseball imposes something on the order of 21 pitching changes over the course of nine innings. Really, could it do anything more to drive away viewers — young ones most particularly?
The economics of baseball for families aren’t all that bad — wide swaths of stadiums’ upper decks and bleacher seats remain within wallets’ reach. Less so, though, I think with big-league hockey. The American League and CHL games I attend are constantly crammed with kiddies. That’s not because they find the NHL boring.
There are great athletes today in hockey, at all levels. This is true to some extent because they have been able to make a connection with the game on television. But could even more great athletes form an attachment with hockey, particularly, say, in urban settings? I think so.
One of the more endearing traditions in the American Hockey League is the relative prevalence of afternoon games. Some are scheduled during September’s preseason slate, others on holidays like Columbus Day. School kids by the busload fill the stands at affordable rates. Hockey wants to be a hit, but first you must hook the kids.
“As viewing habits go,” Roberts concludes, “a sport can’t be a hit if it’s not seen. Football gets that. And with it, all the talent.”  Â
