The World Series

Much is being made of the decline in TV viewers for the World Series, from 34 million viewers in 1973 to 15 million in 2013.  This supposedly represents a diminishing interest in baseball and that may even be true, but we can't eliminate the greed of the TV networks and the baseball owners from the equation.  For one thing, games now start late and, on the East Coast at least, often don't end until after midnight.  Not that long ago games were played during the day, when everyone -- young and old alike -- could watch or listen, but the last game played during the day was game six in 1987;  television money demands night games and as little competition with football as possible. 

The World Series has also diminished in importance with the increasing number of teams in the play-offs, from four to eight and now, ten.  Baseball is a game played every day, a game of quotidian pleasures where a team used to earn its way into the World Series by playing well for more than a hundred and fifty games.  The constant emphasis in our culture of having more and more "winners" has detracted considerably from the pure beauty of the game and made the World Series a much less important event. 

The popularity of baseball has waxed and waned with changes in our society, especially as we have become more urban.  Some consider baseball a part of our more rural past, for better or worse.  There have certainly been a number of (usually) misguided attempts to make it more "relevant" to the modern viewer, including the introduction of astroturf (the purpose of which I never understood, except for saving money on groundskeeping), now mostly abandoned, and the designated hitter, a violation of the lovely balance between fielding and hitting, now unfortunately ensconced in the American League, where the pitcher is never removed for a  pinch hitter.  Part of the problem is certainly that the glut of steroid-fueled home runs in recent years brought in more fans than ever who knew little and cared less about the nuances of the game.

It also should be kept in mind that TV does a terrible job with baseball, the executives admitting that they find baseball boring (see my posts from October 2013) and have to try to make it interesting to the casual fan, with endless replays, close-ups of the dugouts and the fans, and interviews even while the game is going on!  One can't be sure, of course, that this has a negative impact on the number of viewers who watch games, but I can't help but think that one of the reasons people say they find baseball "boring" is that TV shows it as if it were nothing but a battle between pitcher and batter, one of many important elements in a complex game. Undoubtedly many who once tuned in for the game are now turned off by the ignorant babble of the announcers and the constant close-ups of players spitting.