Are 77 Million Paying Customers Irrelevant?

I have a lot of opportunity to listen to sports talk radio -- not that I do, just that I have the opportunity. For one thing, there's no such thing as sports talk radio anymore; there's 24/7 NFL radio with an NBA side dish and some miscellaneous dessert. Around this time golf and Olympics comprise the postprandial offerings. 

In the process, baseball, hockey and all other sports have been relegated to sports talk Siberia. Someone should inform Mike, and also Mike, that Major League baseball games are actually being played during the summer, whereas there is absolutely nothing happening in pro football and basketball, save the verbal diarrhea that pours out across the airwaves about an irrelevant tweet, arrest or contract dispute.

Which brings me to the main point here: how utterly preposterous NBA talk is until the second round of the playoffs in May. Consider this:

• Today is August 6.
• The NBA finals take place in June, 2017, 10 months from now.
• We can agree with nearly 100% certainty that the Cleveland Cavaliers will play in the NBA finals in 2017 unless LeBron James gets hurt.
• We can agree with nearly 100% certainty that if the Cavs don't advance, the East representative will get shellacked in the finals.
• We can agree with nearly 100% certainty that the Golden State Warriors or San Antonio Spurs will represent the West in the NBA finals.
• No other team has any reasonable hope of vying for the title.

And yet, there have been several times more NBA talk on the radio than baseball talk the last two weeks -- even during the run-up to the trade deadline and while the pennant races are shaping up. Actually, that undersells the discrepancy because there was essentially no baseball talk despite the flurry of trade activity.

I understand that football and basketball are young fans' universe, though with supply-side pressure like that, how could they not be? But more than twice as many people attended MLB games last year than NBA and NFL games -- combined. 

So if 77 million people paid hard-earned American legal tender to enjoy ballgames, doesn't it stand to reason that a few of them, occasionally, would rather hear about baseball games actually being played than about some off-season hypotheticals in a league whose first meaningful contests are months away?

How in God's Name Do Hail Marys Work?

For the fourth time this season, I witnessed a game tying or winning Hail Mary throw into the end zone yesterday in the Packers-Cardinals game. Down seven with five seconds left, Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers scrambled away from a withering Arizona rush and flung the ball past the goal line, as everyone on the field, in the stands and watching across the world knew he would.

It's as if God hears a Hail Mary and answers the prayer of the hopeless cause. Maybe the throw should be called a St. Jude. Though, honestly, Mother Mary's results are astonishing.

The gentlemen defending on this play are the globe's greatest American football players. They are athletic freaks in size, strength, speed and agility. They are experienced in the art of defending against the pass. One of the offending defenders, Patrick Peterson, is an All-Pro, which is to say he is among the six or eight greatest pass defenders on Planet Earth.

And yet neither he nor his compatriots can figure out how to knock down this up-for-grabs heave.

I am completely at a loss over how this happens. I am unathletic and middle-aged; I stand 5'9" 160 pounds. I haven't defended a pass in two decades. And yet I know how to prevent a receiver from catching a rainbow. Just get in the way!

In this particular case, Packer receiver Jeff Janis slid in front of the defenders as the ball began its ascent from Rodgers's hand, 41 yards downfield. I could see he was going to catch the ball as soon as the camera panned to the goal line scrum. There was plenty of time for Peterson or Rashad Johnson to slide in front of him. What they did instead, was a colossal, epic, jaw-dropping fail.

And it's becoming pretty common.

So, I implore you, dear reader: leave a comment, explaining how this desperation measure entirely absent a strategy, ever works. Any theory you've got is a step up from my current state of bewilderment.

Why Ben Roethlisberger Is An Asshole

Tracy Wolfson is a professional sports journalist, a knowledgeable sideline reporter with 10 years of experience, a wife and a mother of three sons. None of these descriptions are themselves reasons that she deserves respect.

Following the Bengals' epic collapse of composure against the Steelers in the Wild Card game yesterday, Wolfson asked Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger how his shoulder felt. Rothlisberger had been carted off the field after absorbing a big hit and returned to the game to lead his team on the winning drive seemingly absent the ability to throw downfield.

Evidently Roethlisberger didn't want to linger on the role his injury played in the game. He could have dismissed the question respectfully by saying his shoulder wasn't an issue or it felt good enough to play or he didn't want his injuries to diminish the team's achievement. Instead he said, on national TV, in different words and with a smile, fuck you, Tracy.

It actually sounded more like "I'm just glad we won." Tomato tomahto. It amounted to a disrespectful non-answer. If you invited your neighbor over your house and asked him or her about their ailing shoulder and they said "I'm just glad it's sunny today," you'd wonder what their problem was.

The answer didn't shock me, but her response did. Instead of pressing the question and at least demanding a respectful answer, she let him off the hook. "Why did I know that was going to be your answer?" is what she said.

Here's why, Tracy: because you've let him get away with this condescension before. Stand up for yourself!

A benign question and benign, rambling, cliche-ridden response later, Wolfson tried again, querying whether the shoulder would be ready for the next playoff game. Again, Roethlisberger could have said he'd be ready regardless, or they'd find out that week or simply that his shoulder was fine. Instead, he chose to repeat the first non-answer. That is, he chose to be a patronizing asshole, on national TV, one more time.

It seems that Bill Belicheck has made it fashionable to disdain reporters who are doing their job and asking reasonable, fair, even easy questions. Gregg Popovich is now lauded for treating interviewers like pond scum for no reason. I would like to see a reporter demand of him, in front of a live national audience, why he feels it's necessary to belittle the interviewer.

Of course, the real problem is that the networks interview these guys at all. When I was a reporter, if someone was a lousy interview, I wouldn't look to them for quotes. If Belicheck, Popovich and Rothlisberger can't be civil and respectful, find other people to interview. Everyone will be happier.

I worked as a radio reporter in one town that was having big issues with its water system. The town supervisor would purposely lower his voice or mumble when the questions got tough, so that I couldn't use those answers in my stories. As a result, I stopped calling him and instead sought out more critical voices. When he asked me why I didn't talk to him, I described why it was his own fault. We agreed that I would give him another chance and when I did he answered my questions directly.

It turns out that Roethlisberger may have a separated shoulder and miss the divisional round game against Denver. I wonder how smug he feels now that he can't insult Tracy Wolfson about it.

The Myth About Baseball's Declining Popularity

Once again in 2014, ratings for the Super Bowl topped the number of actual human beings on Earth. Evidently some giant coconut crabs and Madagascan aye-ayes were also catching the big game on their smart phones.

Meanwhile, ratings for the World Series continue to float around the lowest depths known to human history. So woe is baseball right?

Sure, if that's your entire worldview. Measured against NFL football's voracious maw, baseball is fading to a pinprick. But then so are presidential elections, African genocide, all television sitcoms and dramas, basketball, hockey, bowling, tennis, boxing and post-Tiger golf.

Less For Everyone
The fact is, TV ratings for basically everything but reality shows has declined in the last 20 years, and they're only exempt because they didn't exist that far back. The diversity of options has dispersed audiences and lowered everyone's ratings.

In the early 70s, all of America tuned in for All In the Family. The #1 show in the nation snagged a 34 rating. Twenty shows total -- including Ironsides, The Flip Wilson Show and the Partridge Family -- pulled ratings of 22+.

By 1998-89, Seinfeld led the ratings by capturing white viewers and a 21.3 rating. It would not have placed in the top 20 in 1972.

By 2008, the top-rated show, American Idol, cleared just a 16.1 rating, capturing mainly young white adults and teens.

Wherefore Art Thou, Bowling?
It's the same issue for sporting events. You hardly have to see the numbers to know that nearly the entire audiences for hockey, boxing and bowling have found other things to do. The average NBA game of the week in 1996 earned a 5.0 rating; the highest rated NBA game last season, a Pacers-Heat tilt featuring LeBron, pulled a 2.4.

So yeah, baseball's TV viewership is down too. The nation used to come to a halt during the World Series and now it comes to a halt during the World Series if someone scores a touchdown in one of the NFL games being played that day. But by another measure, baseball is healthier than Chuck Norris.

We're Watching -- In Person
Last year, 74 million people bought tickets to Major League Baseball games. From Seattle to Miami and Cleveland to Phoenix, the turnstiles once again spun at a rate never fathomed even 15 years ago. The top 10 seasons for attendance for MLB have all occurred in the last decade. 

Sure, there are more games and more teams now than, say, in the "Golden Age" of the 1950s. And stadiums hold more people. It's all true. So is this: teams are filling a higher percentage of their ballparks than in the 50s by a wide margin, en route to doubling average attendance.

Remember that in the 50s the NFL was a wish and the NBA was a dream. Six NHL teams -- two of them in Canada and all of them playing in the winter, were no competition for baseball. Color TV, Disney parks, video games and the long list of alternatives to an afternoon at the park had yet to debut. And yet, twice as many people per team journey to see the hometown nine today as did then. 

By comparison, NFL teams drew just 17.3 million people despite more teams and larger stadiums. NFL teams play just once a week, but that's the point. They don't have to entice fans every day the way baseball does. 
 
Howard Wolowitz Isn't Worried
So let's stop bemoaning the falling TV numbers for baseball's flagship games, unless you're prepared to suffer the sad ratings fate of every other non-football property. You'll have to pity The Big Bang Theory's poor performance while you're at it. Instead, enjoy America's pastime -- on your TV, your computer, your phone or at the ballpark, as Americans have done for 150 years and will do for another 150.

Play ball!

The Question Not Being Asked In the Ray Rice Case

The critical question in the fiasco surrounding Baltimore Ravens' running back Ray Rice is not one of the 46 you've been hearing and reading.

The critical question is: If you were shocked by the video of Rice delivering a knockout punch to his fiancee in the elevator, what the hell is wrong with you?

After all, we already knew that Rice had knocked his fiancee unconscious. That had been established prior to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's laughably tone-deaf two-game suspension.

So what did you think happened in that elevator? That Rice kissed his wife too exuberantly? 

What's shocking is not that Rice's vicious punch was unusual but that it was so utterly mundane. That is what domestic abuse looks like. Did people really not know that?

In fact, Rice's abuse was relatively benign in the world of domestic abuse. After all, it consisted of a single blow, not a sustained attack.

Moreover, the release of video that vividly portrays Rice's violence primarily diminished the reputation of others, not of the football player himself. We knew what we had there -- or should have -- even without visual evidence.

The reactionary responses of Roger Goodell and the Baltimore Ravens have swathed them both in ignominy. What is eminently clear is that the league and the team are not concerned about the rampant domestic violence perpetrated by their employees but are hypocritically reacting (or pre-acting) to the ignorant public outrage they correctly expected the video would incite. (Ignorant not because outrage is unwarranted but because it was warranted absent the video.)

Remember, this is video that the league and the team either did or should have had possession of and could have obtained with little effort. Which means they either ignored it when it was known only to a handful of people or willfully avoided its acquisition knowing full well how poorly it would reflect on the game.

These are the same Ravens who welcomed back their star with open arms during the exhibition season. This is the same commissioner who imposed the same sanction on a violent criminal that he imposes on gentlemen who smoke a joint during their off-hours -- but only if it's their first offense.

And this is the same public, at least in Baltimore, that gave Rice a standing ovation when he returned to the field. A standing ovation. Nothing has changed since, except that those fans can no longer rationalize to themselves that it was just a family squabble.

To add stupid to liar, Goodell violated his own newly established penalty matrix for domestic violence, established just a week prior. Goodell had prescribed a six-game suspension for ordinary domestic violence not involving a child or a pregnant woman. This is the definition of ordinary abuse, yet Goodell suspended Rice indefinitely, with the strong suggestion that the punishment will last all year.

This is one of those cases where everyone even tangentially involved has rolled in the mud. Rice is a thug, Goodell a liar and a hypocrite, the Ravens the same, the fans boorish and self-centered, Ravens' coach John Harbaugh a mendacious, self-indulgent creep, and so on. I'm pretty sure Geraldo Rivera looks bad in all of this, though who would notice.

There's another domestic violence case on Goodell's docket, because NFL players can't go two weeks without beating the women in their thrall. There's no video on this one, at least as far as we know, so let's see how the league handles it. Nothing Goodell does will mollify anyone paying attention. He's already made such a hash of his own system that there is no longer any possibility of fairness or consistency.

Potential New Rule Is the N-word: Nuts

Of all the silly, poorly-considered, unenforceable, counter-productive rules that have been proposed and adopted by the NFL, one stands out: the one currently being considered. And it shines a light on how American society has elevated symbols over reality to a degree that borders on cultural mental illness.

The rule would designate a 15-yard penalty for any player who uses the word, "nigger" on the field. This concept is so utterly without merit it beggars the imagination.

Make no mistake, in a particular context, "nigger" conveys a despicable sentiment that harkens to our nation's shameful legacy of slavery and oppression of black Americans. When a person who is not black uses "nigger" as a slur to denigrate a black American, that person is disgracing himself, and deserves all the antipathy that can be heaped upon him.

What's despicable about this invective is the sentiment, not the word, which we have imbued with mystical powers. I've heard many South Carolinians spew racial hatred towards the President of the United States, including fantasizing about assassinating him, without ever using the magic word. And I've heard black friends greet each other with it. The former is not one bit less racist for the absence of the word and the latter is utterly lacking in ill will despite its use. There is nothing inherent to the word, a collection of sounds after all, that is abhorrent; it's the meaning. And meaning can only be understood inside of context. 

Consider the discussions you've heard about use of what many refer to as "the N-word." Because our society has assigned such toxicity to the word "nigger," no one can say it without severe disapprobation, even when they are talking about the word itself.  So we use a stand-in for the word, a symbol for a symbol, because we have confused the first symbol with the original reality. And all of us understand that this new symbol, "the N-word" has the very same meaning as the original symbol. So what is gained? If we're talking about "nigger" why can't we say it? How is using "N-word" any better? (Ditto for all the other iterations of this trope -- the "f-word," etc.)

If racists nationwide all agreed to stop using the word "nigger" and instead expressed their narrow-minded hatred with "N-word" instead, how would that be an improvement? According to those who are supporting this potential NFL rule, if a white Southerner angrily berated the black player lined up across from him with "I'm going to kill you, you nappy-headed, spear-chucking, N-word jungle-bunny," that would be totally acceptable, but friendly on-field bantering between black teammates that included "nigger" as a note of solidarity would result in a penalty. The absurdity is palpable.

Our society already has its own 15-yard penalty for use of the word as a racist slur. Paula Deen lost millions of dollars, not for saying the word, but for admitting that she had employed it years in the past. The NFL, which is 70% black, has a built-in disincentive against hurling racial invective in the form of broken legs. 

The NFL should stay out of the idiot business and concentrate on the problems its players actually have with domestic violence, off-field violence of other types, alcohol and drug use, fiscal irresponsibility, functional illiteracy and brain injury, each of which is far more troublesome than mean language. And the rest of us should stop granting this collection of sounds such power over our emotions, and instead work harder to understand each other's American experience.

Bold Prediction: Either New England or Denver Will Win!

Coming up next, expert analyst gives us his picks for the championship ga -- click!

Could anything be more futile and less edifying than this? Consider what knowledge must be willfully suspended in order to care about his prediction:

1. There are two games. Four teams. We all know who they are. Two of them will win. Either Seattle or San Francisco. Either Denver or New England. What can the analyst tell you that you don't know? That underdog Jacksonville is going to surprise everyone?
2. They are more-or-less evenly matched. So even the most insightful observer hasn't the foggiest idea who is going to win. No to put too fine a point on it: give the four choices to a mentally retarded seven-year-old and she would have exactly the same chance of being right as the "insider."
3. It's one game. The best team often doesn't win. So even if you know who's better, you don't know who will win.
4. Games rarely proceed as expected. All the knowledge in the world about what happened before has limited value now.
5. There are external variables that the prognosticator can't know in advance, like weather and injuries. If Tom Brady breaks his leg in the second quarter, do you suppose that might have an impact on the outcome?
6. He's constantly wrong. (Everyone is.) Publicly. And yet people still value his predictions.

Thank goodness for Baseball Prospectus podcasts.

A Conspiracy of Willful Amnesia

It was a rainy day in Charleston so I settled in to watch some footballs. With three games left in the NFL's regular season there were several near-elimination contests whose outcomes really mattered. For sure Fox and CBS would show the Dallas-Green Bay showdown whose loser would be in deep playoff purgatory or the Miami-New England contest critical to the Dolphins ' playoff push.

After all, making the post-season tournament is all that matters. As anyone who's followed the NFL even casually knows all too well, any team can hoist the trophy once they qualify for the tournament. Last year, the 10-6 Baltimore Ravens played three games, two on the road, on their way to Super Bowl victory. The year before, the 9-7 NY Giants ran the same gauntlet. In 2010, the 10-6 Green Bay Packers slipped in on a Wild Card and swept three road games en route to the championship. And so on.

In other words, every player, coach, GM, owner, writer, broadcaster and fan knows that seeding is irrelevant. Home field confers as much advantage as the return from injury of a flanker. A first-round bye guarantees passage into the second round -- and nothing more.

So what game did I see? That riveting Seattle-Giants affair, a Seahawk whitewashing that had utterly no relevance in the standings. Seattle had already clinched. New Jersey was already eliminated. Why on Earth would Fox show this desultory affair? It's not like I live in the Pacific Northwest or the teeming metropolis.

Then, adding insult to injury, the announcers on the Seahawks-Giants fiasco mentioned the high drama taking place in Miami. With their playoff hopes hanging by a thread, the Dolphins led New England by four points with Tom Brady poised a few yards from the end zone as the final seconds ticked down. And my television continued to show a meaningless 23-0 egg-laying.

You'd never know of my contest's irrelevance from the network description. According to them, Seattle was battling to maintain their home field playoff edge. The Seahawks, they said, were in a dogfight with New Orleans for that coveted one-seed and needed to defeat today's foe.

The next day, a national sports talk show asked its four hyperbolic panelists if Miami gained more than New England lost. This tripe was presented as a matter of opinion, as if New England's playoff seeding were as momentous as Miami's uphill climb into the postseason.

There are only two possibilities here: everyone involved in the game is lying through their teeth or there is a conspiracy of willful amnesia. The constant talk of seeding as if it correlates with playoff success requires that all the analysts, observers and fans squeeze their eyes shut so tight that they momentarily forget that most of these games don't matter. 

We see this in sports all the time. The talk about NBA playoff seeding is so totally laughable it goes beyond amnesia to schizophrenia. Fans of the sport are so paralyzed by grief for any drama in the season that they remain stuck in its first stage -- denial. College pigskin fans work themselves into a lather every season fretting about multiple-undefeated-team scenarios that never pan out. And, of course, all sports fans invoke "momentum" as if it's a guarantor of future events rather than a description of the past.

Wake up everyone, so on a rainy day I can watch a game that has some meaning.

The NFL's Existential Crisis

In 1970, appointed New York Senator Charles Goodell, a liberal Republican running for a full six-year term, faced an ideological sandwich between Democratic challenger Richard Ottinger on the left and Conservative James Buckley on the right.  Many liberals and moderates asked Goodell to withdraw, but he demurred. Come election day, Ottinger nabbed the liberal vote, Buckley swept the conservative and Goodell's political career went "poof."

But that was nothing for the Goodell family.

Forty-two years later, pity his son Roger, chief executive officer of a $9 billion existential crisis. Goodell has served as the involuntary hatchet man for an industry whose product causes its employees massive physical degradation, traumatic brain injury and early death. The agent of these horrors -- repeated high-speed collisions -- is also the extraordinarily popular main product peddled by Goodell's industry, and his employees not only chafe at his efforts to safeguard their health they revile and deride him. Worse: so do many of his business's best customers.

At the same time, a large group of former employees are suing Goodell's industry for the very policies that current employees vociferously defend. Despite his industry's battalion of deep-pocketed counselors, the lawsuit is a multi-billion-dollar slam dunk.

The current Goodell faces an ideological sandwich similar to his father's and the knowledge that unless he carefully navigates the issue, he could be presiding over the most popular sport in American history also going "poof."

Most challenging for Goodell fils: the lawsuit, the players, the fans, the derision, they're all a sideshow. The commissioner's real challenge is this: the weekly car crashes that devastate players' bodies and threaten his sport are the grist of the NFL mill. Violence is killing the business, but without violence -- head-snapping, bone-crunching, felonious violence -- there is no business. Oh, the humanity.

So Goodell is doing what his father couldn't: manage the clock. He is attempting to slowly parse out the bodily destruction that can be attributed to the league while preserving the essential mayhem that propels the NFL ever upward in the world sports landscape. It's akin to carving out the fat from bacon, which is why it will take time and upset a lot of people. If he fails, Roger Goodell will have presided over the demise of a massive, unsinkable enterprise, legislated and litigated into oblivion.

If he succeeds, he will merely be remembered for ruining the game. And Gary Bettman thought he had problems.

More and More and More Playoffs: Blecch

My newspaper tells me that tonight's NFL tilt between Atlanta and Detroit will help determine whether the Falcons clinch home field advantage on the road to the Super Bowl. The implication is that the contest is significant for this reason despite decades of experience.

In fact, tonight's clash is a near total irrelevance. The last two Super Bowl champs staggered to 9-7 records and slipped into the playoffs in the last week before eliminating all those 13-3 and 12-4 behemoths with home field advantage.

In fact, in American professional sports today simply making the playoffs is the entire goal. Period. After that, flip a coin.

Don't believe me? The football Giants weren't the only team last year to parlay a mediocre regular season into a crown. The L.A. Kings stumbled into the NHL playoffs with more losses than wins, qualified last and then swept through their conference with easy wins over the #1, #2 and #3 seeds before winning the cup in six games.

The 2011 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals snuck into the post-season on the last day of the regular season with the worst record in the playoffs. (The 2012 World Series champs, the division-winning S.F. Giants, were a legitimate champion.)

During a thankfully truncated NBA season, the Miami Heat faced boobirds and derision because of a 9-8 start before capturing the #2 seed in the East and winning it all.

So when the NHL announces that half its season is lost, even hockey fans should applaud. Forty games seems about right if all they're going to do is eliminate a handful of awful teams. (On the other hand, the league and its players appear on the verge of another Armageddon. All involved have a bright future in Congress, once they earn their American citizenship.)

And we should all laugh when the sport's advocates promote a meaningless match-up like tonight's Falcon-Lion snoozer, as a playoff positioner. Anyone paying the least bit of attention anytime over the last three decades realizes there's no such thing.

A good rule of thumb for playoffs should be this: Qualifying should be sufficiently difficult that some good teams get left out. That ensures that playoff qualifying is an accomplishment and that a good team will win the title irrespective of who catches fire for a couple of weeks in the post-season. Major League baseball and the NFL are both straddling the line, which the NBA and NHL long ago breached.

The NFL is reportedly considering the addition of two more teams to its playoff lineup. It is difficult to overstate how awesomely awful this idea is. Adding two more palyoff slots guarantees that an 8-8 team will parlay a couple of fluke wins into a Super Bowl championship. Blecch.

How About That Momentum!

For all you momentum buffs, which is to say, you believers in UFOs, ghosts, the single bullet theory, and stimulus packages, I would offer a modest proposal.

Entering the NFL playoffs, the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints had combined to lose their last five games after winning their first 27. 

The San Diego Chargers had prevailed in their previous 11. 

Remember all the analysts pooh-poohing Indy and Norlins because they didn't have any momentum? And touting SD? I wonder what Super Bowl they'll be watching.

Here was the San Francisco 49ers' season: They won their first game. And their second. Lost their third. Won their fourth. Lost their next four. They had momentum going against them, right? But they won their next game, then lost, then won, lost, won, lost, won and won. The 49ers were twice as likely to lose if they won the game before, or win if they lost the game before. Did momentum take every other week off?

Here's the modest proposal: if you still think there is some magic force by which teams and individuals succeed because they succeeded the last time or two, I propose that you need your head examined.

A baseball player doesn't get a hit because he was safe in his last two at-bats. Teams don't win because they swept the previous three game series. They get hits, and win, because they're good, or lucky, or both.

That's not to say that success doesn't breed self-confidence, which leads to more success. But the concept of self-confidence has a name and it's not momentum. So let's let the momentum shibboleth rest in peace, okay?

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