Expanding Playoffs and Contracting Audiences

Anyone who pays any attention to MLB TV ratings knows how pathetic they are when compared to those of NFL or NCAA football. The ratings for baseball playoff games are consistently dwarfed by mediocre football games when they are aired opposite one another, with few exceptions. The NFL draft crushes everything on TV, so much so that the NFL draft is on in primetime and expanding.

In MLB, the Yankees and Red Sox draw big ratings, and generally the Chicago and LA markets do well, but the relatively big increase in ratings for those games is mostly regional, and the NY, Boston, LA, etc. markets are enormous. Plus, there is the residual effect of having star-laden teams that draw people from across the nation. Love or hate the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, and Cubs, people will watch them play post-season baseball.

It’s apparently a done deal for 2012 that baseball will add at least one more wild card team in each league for the post-season. We all know it’s being done for the money, which is all right, because after all, we are not communists, and MLB is a business.

I do think that it’s sad that the championship nature of baseball is being further diluted. It began with expansion in 1969, and 4 teams competing in post-season. With each succeeding expansion of MLB, it feels as though we’ve added another layer of teams to the playoff mix. 50 years ago it was pretty easy to figure out which baseball team was the best in a season. Even if someone knew next to nothing about the game, they might be able to recall the World Series winner, and by naming that team, they’d have an excellent chance of naming the “best” team in any given year. Does anyone have a good argument for San Francisco really being the best team in 2010? How about Texas?

All that aside, and as much as I don’t like it, I can’t bother ranting against the inevitable expansion of the post-season in MLB, because it’s a complete waste of energy.

However, I can rant about three other huge problems MLB has.

The first is one millions of people on the East coast have been bitching about for years, namely the late starting times for post-season games. Can anyone reasonably argue with me that adults who are not inclined to watch games to begin with will not watch them if they have to stay up until after midnight to see an entire game. I am inclined, and I won’t (or can’t) stay up that late most nights.

My solution (and the solution for millions of others) is that because the biggest part of the MLB television fan base lives in the Eastern Time Zone, start post-season games no later than 7:30 PM Eastern time. The LA market is an early one anyway, why else would thousands leave Dodger games in the 7th inning?

How are kids going to become fans, if they aren’t allowed to watch the playoffs? It’s absurd – there isn’t any argument here.

The second is the insipid marketing of MLB on a national level. Sometimes I think that MLB hired the idiots that couldn’t get jobs with the National Hockey League, it’s been so bad. The NHL Commissioner is Gary Bettman. He’s a guy who worked for NBA Commissioner David Stern, who was given the credit for what Magic, Larry and Michael are owed, but at least he’s working hard the right way to promote his sport. On the other hand, Bettman, who (many hailed as a “genius”) was handed Gretzky and Lemieux and then managed to get an entire NHL season cancelled, and came back with a TV contract that 80% of the country can’t access. Brilliant!

I need to start bothering the idiots running the MLB Network. If I were in charge, I’d make the MLB Network inexpensive (or free) for cable providers to carry, and pay to advertise the hell out of it in every MLB market. They have the dollars to do this, and it wouldn’t cost that much in relative terms. There is no major sport on TV from mid-June until early August. Show old games (or clips of games) on TV with commentary. Hire Ken Burns and others like him to do a “30 for 30” on baseball. Give kids and other fans reasons to want to see Hanley Ramirez, Felix Hernandez pitch, or Ozzie Guillen rant.

Right away, next season, one thing MLB should do is to start giving away tickets to kids, especially for all those hundreds of games that have “crowds” filling less than half of the park. There is an argument that “if it’s free, it’s not worth anything.” Bullshit. Get kids hooked on the game, and maybe there’s a better chance they’ll be season ticket holders in the future? Give them enough games and I’d bet many of them will watch games on TV. Most will grow up and buy stuff, and a lot of that ‘stuff’ may as well be MLB stuff. Meanwhile, while at these games, wouldn’t someone be buying these kids food and drinks, and other memorabilia? Wouldn’t someone have to get them to the games? I mean buses or trains or cars, which is money spent somewhere, and the adults might be purchasing a beverage or two, but maybe only adult beverages if they aren't driving?

Seriously, how cool would it be to have seen a really good Tampa Bay team with 35,000 people in the park? 18,000 boys and girls ages 8-13, amped up on Pepsi and screaming for the Rays, and pledging their everlasting love and devotion for Carl Crawford and Carlos Pena if they’d just stay with the team in 2011?

Third is to speed up the damn game. Forget the thing about giving the pitcher 15 or 20 (or whatever the hell it was?) seconds between pitches until something else is done. I think it was Rick Reilly (who I really like) that had the dumbest suggestion that I’ve heard – limit the number of pick off attempts per runner. Yeah? That’s akin to telling a NFL secondary that the next play is a freakin’ run.

My solution is simple, just tell the home plate umpire to not grant time to the batter after single every pitch! Make the batter stay in the batter’s box unless he is hurt, and then throw a timer on the pitcher to throw the damn ball. I can’t remember exactly when I heard it last summer, and who (or where) I heard it from, but I think it was Jon Miller who had watched a Kinescope of a World Series game from 1953, and the game had taken a little over two hours to play. Can you imagine? These days, 2 hours of baseball gets you into the bottom of the 5th in a Yankee/Red Sox game in mid-May. If its Pittsburgh and Florida, who’d watch four hours of that? I mean, aside from me and a few thousand Pirate fans?

If MLB did that, they could move post-season games to a 7:45 PM start time, because they’d have an excellent shot at having 90% of them end before 10:30. With a 7:15 PM start, most would end well before 10:00 PM. Wow.

This was a rant. Have atcha!