When I was a kid, I loved baseball more than anything, and I’m afraid I mean that literally — more than my family, my friends, even more than my dog. If given the opportunity, I would have played baseball 24 hours a day. And when I couldn’t play it, I would watch it on T.V.
Now I can barely sit through a whole inning of a game on T.V.
Judging from the World Series T.V. ratings for the past 40 years — they’ve slipped from a 22.8 rating/57 share in 1968 to 10.6 rating/18 share in 2007 — I am not alone.
Why? Maybe I and a lot of people have adult-onset A.D.D. and need more stimulation than baseball can offer. Maybe there are just too many other forms of entertainment. Or maybe the game is just too boring.
Is it more boring than it was in 1968?
No, but it hasn’t changed much since then either. If you are a traditionalist, which I am in many ways, this could be good news. But since sport is entertainment, you have to keep in mind that people get bored watching the same game play out every day.
Football and basketball may be more innately exciting than baseball, but just as important, they’ve also changed a lot over the past 40 years. They are full of innovation.
What is baseball’s biggest innovation of the past 40 years? Steroids maybe. Or the specialization of the pitching staff (yawn).
You may not like all the changes in other sports, but it does keep things interesting. Baseball, meanwhile — well, if you have watched enough of it, you know exactly what’s coming at just about any point in the game. You can predict what the manager will do in a given situation. You can predict what the commentators will say after the play.
Darren Everson has written a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal about how a few baseball managers are trying some new things, however marginal. Here are a few examples from Everson’s piece:
1) Having a relief pitcher play the outfield for a batter or two and then come back in and pitch; this gets around the archaic substitution rules — you can’t take a pitcher out of the game and bring him back in — while still letting you practice situational pitching.
2) Putting an infield shift even on a right-handed batter like Vladimir Guerrero, which means asking any of the three infielders who might field the ball to make a long throw to first.
3) If bad weather is forecast, don’t waste your starting pitcher; instead, start a bullpen pitcher. More broadly, use relievers to start the game but have them pitch only a few innings, bringing in your “starter” to finish the game off, including innings eight and nine.
4) Have your pitcher bat eighth instead of ninth so your ninth-place hitter can set things up for the top of the lineup.
I particularly like what Bill James had to say in Everson’s article about why most managers do the same thing in baseball:
“A blunder by a manager is a move that is A) unconventional, B) doesn’t work, and C) occurs at a moment of focus in the game,” says Bill James, senior baseball-operations adviser with the Boston Red Sox. “If you put those three things together, you have a blunder. As long as you do what’s conventional, you won’t be accused of a blunder.”
While none of the above examples are earth-shattering, they’d certainly make the game a bit more fluid and fun to watch. I am guessing that you all can come up with at least a few dozen other potential changes, including rule changes, that would make baseball better without damaging its great tradition.
A lot of these changes might not have to do with how the game is played but rather how it is presented on T.V.; the long commercial break between each half-inning, for instance, is a gilded invitation to go watch something else.
I understand that the game is the game and that you don’t want to start installing trampolines in the outfield, for instance. But aren’t there some things that could be done to make people like me who used to love the game want to watch it again?
and 
. You can also watch it on 
One big complaint is that games take too long now because of too many specialized relievers. I don’t know if there’s really a way to stop that without putting the team at a big disadvantage. Bill James had an idea about limiting that.
More offense would probably make people more interested, which is what steroids did. Lower the mound some more?
I think other people are frustrated because the game isn’t as competitive as the other sports. Rebuilding takes forever for some teams and other small market teams must watch their star players leave/get traded once they start making money. The small market teams can’t even afford to draft whoever they want because they can’t sign certain players. A lot of fans want revenue sharing and some sort of cap, but it is very unlikely to happen.
In order to make baseball more interesting you need to stop watching and listen on the radio. There is nothing better than listening to the game while doing yardwork or tinkering in the garage.
One reason baseball is “boring” is because it takes so long. The time taken between pitches is a joke. Batters and pitchers go through asinine little rituals (batters fidget with their gloves, pitchers circle the mound, that sort of thing). In particular, batters step into and out of the batter’s box WAY too often. I had thought there were rules about this, but either there aren’t any, or umpires aren’t enforcing them. The rules concerning pitchers are enforced, in the form of balks, but not very frequently.
I understand whyt his happens … pitchers and batters are trying to “psycho one another out” … but come on. A baseball game used to take a couple of hours; now, it’s common for them to run well over 4 hours, all because of this “game within a game” that batters and pitchers play with each other. If a player has some sort of compulsion which forces him to go through these little rituals … well … OCD is a treatable disorder. Beyond that, there’s no longer any rational excuse for it.
It’s time to get the game moving again. MLB needs a rule like “no more than 30 seconds between pitches” or something like that; umpires then need to enforce it. Unfortunately this problem is not new to MLB, it’s been commented on for several years now. Since no one has acted yet, one can safely assume no remedy is coming in the future. I have no idea why nothing is done about it, but apparently MLB likes it this way.
In the last 40 years, I think the pitching mound was lowered and the designated hitter was introduced to the AL (both things I think should be reverted). So I don’t think there has been zero innovation.
I love baseball, but they have got to do something to speed it up! Ideas: Once a batter enters the batter’s box, he cannot step out; limit catchers to throwing only one signal to the pitcher; remove the DH; drop five or six teams from the league; play one-game series in the regular season and three-game series in the playoffs.
I think the decline in TV ratings is more a function of less people watching network TV. Baseball is extremely healthy.
1.) According to Forbes magazine review of baseball teams. The value of a baseball franchise is increasing on the order of 15% a year.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/33/Value_1.html
2.) Millions of fans like me are watching games on MLB internet portal. Turning into to a website worth billions of dollars.
I would consider a few minor tweaks, but baseball is alive and well!
Baseball is, at its core, still a great game. There’s simply too many other things going on in our lives to be able to sit and watch a three hour game when you know there are 161 other games just like it throughout the year.
I love my Angels, but I struggle to watch a full game unless I have my laptop with me and something else to keep me occupied for part of that three hours.
Here’s some of my ideas….
If I remember correctly, there is no instant replay in baseball. I think anything that makes sure the right call was made should be added in–perhaps each team can make two intant replay requests per game.
Another thing I hate is all the substitution. If you’re playing the field, you have to bat for yourself, run for yourself, and so forth. This mixing and matching is just stupid.
I like the idea that you can score on a third out…if you beat the catch to home plate. That is, if there’s two out and a guy on third, and the batter pops up to left field, if the guy on third can get home before the catch, it should count.
One way to really force some care into the game would be the rule that ONLY, say, two or three pitchers per game can be used per side…so you better pick and choose wisely. If the second one is injured and has to come off the field, the first one has to go back on, etc.
I consider a lot of the rule “effeminizing” of the sport. They make it too easy on the guys. Yes, these are great sportsmen…but they sit on the bench until they bat…they don’t have anything to do unless a ball comes to them…and they are often substituted, making it even easier.
Let’s bring some Ty Cobb back to the sport.