Baseball LCS ratings down! The world is coming to an end!

Dick Whitman: If the playoffs were shorter, ratings would go up. It's a whole month of playoff baseball now -- most of it night games. I think audiences do burn out, especially if they're from a town where a team got eliminated.
There should have been a bridge sentence in my post. The idea of expanding the playoffs is that you increase the chances of more teams in what used to be called pennant races in the regular season, hence increasing regular season fan interest.
PS: The notion there's more competition in football than baseball stems from innumeracy, namely, the inability to comprehend the difference between a 16 and 162 game season. It FEELS like the Orioles lose every game, because they play every day and lose most of them. But baseball NEVER has teams with the winning percentages, or rather losing percentages, of the NFL teams that will be racing down the stretch in the Luck Sweepstakes come December.

 

That last bit simply isn't true. Not entirely. Anybody who can't see the built-in advantage the big-revenue franchises have over the small ones in baseball either isn't payint attention or is intentionally shoving his or her head into the sand. You can question how big of an impact it has, but no reasonable observer can honestly say it isn't there.

 

Only one of the last five World Series champs have come from a televison smaller than Boston (the Cardinals). Only one of the five Super Bowl champions has come from a top 20 market (the Giants).

 

Lancey, I must repeat myself. Football's outcomes are more random than baseball's because there are so many fewer games. There are of course other factors, but that's the biggest one. Just as an experiment, go to the sports page next April and check the baseball standings after 16 games.
One baseball team, the Red Sox, has one more than one title in the 2000s (Cards still have a chance). Two NFL teams, the Pats and Steelers, have five Super Bowls between them. Anyone can cherry pick stats from small sample sizes to (not) prove their point.

 

Funny you mention Griffey. I was discussing with a co-worker yesterday that Griffey might be the last multimedia superstar MLB has had. Jeter is the most prominent player to the general public today, but his endorsements are probably a fraction of Griffey's. Ditto with Pujols or A-Rod. Griffey had a popular line of Nikes, a popular (if flawed) SNES game and was inescapable if you were even remotely tuned into pop culture. Now it's regional stars and distant to unlikeable players. I don't know if that's something MLB can really control, but having a Shaq-like personality on one of their teams would help national marketing for sure.

 

The fact that one of those two NFL teams you mentioned is a small market speaks volumes. Of course, the baseball apologists just keep shoving their fingers in their ears.

 

What exactly does baseball need to apologize for?

 

Ask the apologists. They are the ones who can't admit that MLB isn't the best-run league in professional sports and it has a system that allows the World Series to be bought.

 

This Series sucks. Damn them for not having any drama that will create bigger ratings. They should have had Ryan Howard hit that home run, or maybe Dustin Pedroia.

 

And if baseball did a better job trying to build its audience nationally rather than focusing on regional, more people would be watching it.

 

I don't care. I don't see why anyone would care. I just watched an unbelievably entertaining baseball game.

 

Because some of us want baseball to be better. Not the games, but the overall health of the sport. Not that it is hurting, but it could be even better.