Why Baseball Isn't As Exciting...To The Casual Sports Fan
By Paul Semendinger
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Note - This article appeared in the IBWAA's daily newsletter "Here's the Pitch" on January 27, 2024.
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I recently had a discussion on why the casual sports fan doesn't find baseball as exciting as the other major sports - most specifically football and basketball. A host of theories were bandied about, but I believe I figured out the answer.
It is actually an easy answer and it explains why, in a fast-paced, what-have-you-done-recently world, baseball doesn't grab the attention of many casual or would-be sports fans as readily as football or basketball.
Many "experts" believe that baseball's problem lies in marketing. But the real reason has little to do with "star power" and the ways the various sports market their biggest players.
Others believe the reason is the pace of the games, and while that is part of the reason, the answer is actually much simpler than that.
The reason baseball is not as attractive to many casual sports fans lies in something much more basic and obvious to the sport iself. There is also nothing the caretakers of the game can do to fix this, because what makes baseball unattractive to many is actually what makes it great.
And the simple answer is failure.
In baseball, the players fail. Often. We all know and appreciate this. It is what makes the game special. We know that a .300 hitter fails seven out of ten times.
(So much of how we understand the world centers on language. Imagine if, instead of calling a player a ".300 Hitter," we called him a "30 percenter." Or, how's this, "The last great hitting season was 1941 when ol' Ted Williams failed just under sixty percent of the time. Truly remarkable!")
But I digress...
When fans tune in to watch a sport, they are, of course, attracted to the game's biggest stars. They want to see the stars showing their greatness, demonstrating why they are so exceptional. If the casual sports fan puts on an NBA game, that fan will see the stars scoring points. If LeBron James is playing, he'll score, time and time and time again. It isn't difficult to see the great players doing great things, it happens all the time in basketball.
If a casual fan tunes into the NFL, that fan is going to most likely focus on the quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, for example. The fan is going to want to see Patrick Mahomes doing something special. And in every game, he does, again - time after time after time. The fan will see that every single offensive play revolves around Mahomes. They'll see him run, they'll see him pass. In most games, probably all, they'll see Patrick Mahomes lead his team to at least one touchdown, probably more.
The cameras are always on the big stars of the other sports and in every single game, without fail, the big stars perform. It's the nature of those games.
But if a casual fan tunes in to watch baseball, most of the time, that fan is going to see the game's biggest stars fail.
If fans tuned in to see Aaron Judge in 2022 with the hopes of seeing him hit a home run, during his record-breaking season, the vast majority of the time, the fan will leave disappointed. (Some quick math: A baseball season is 162 games. Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs in 2022. One might assume, then, that in 61.7% of the Yankees games played in 2022 that Judge didn't homer, but it's worse than that. In 2022, Judge had eleven multi-homer games. That means, he only homered in 51 different games. As such, in 68.6% of all the games the Yankees played in 2022, Aaron Judge failed to hit a home run.)
In the 2022 NFL season, there wasn't any game that the Chiefs played where they failed to score a touchdown. If fans tuned in to see Patrick Mahomes perform well, they would have seen it.
In the 2022-23, LeBron James' worst game saw him hit five baskets, two were three-pointers. The casual fan saw the star score multiple times.
But, in 2022, a casual fan might have tuned in to a Yankees game on July 27. The Yankees were playing the Mets - a premium game! Aaron Judge was already making headlines because he was having a great season. The fan that day would see Judge strikeout three times in five at bats. In his other two trips to the plate, he flew out and grounded out. Judge played centerfield that game and made but one putout. In other words, to the casual fan, he basically did nothing.
Now, one might argue that fans might like watching great pitchers, but great pitchers, even in their best games, don't dominate like the stars in other sports. In most games, pitchers allow lots of base runners. In most games teams score runs off even the best pitchers. No pitcher had more shutouts in his career than Walter Johnson (110). The other way to see that is that in 556 of his other career starts, Johnson allowed at least a run.
As baseball fans, we understand this. We appreciate it. It's part of the game. These facts are, in large part, why we love the game. But for the casual fans, the ones who the sport might hope to attract, the fact that most often, most of the time, the game's biggest players fail to do anything special, I believe is what makes them less interested in the sport.
Failure is one aspect of baseball that makes it great. It's what makes it special. It's also what makes it less attractive to the casual fan. (But don't get me wrong, I wouldn't change a thing about any of that.)
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Paul Semendinger runs the Yankees site Start Spreading the News. His newest book, 365.2 Going the Distance - A Runner's Journey documents his quest to run every single day for a year. That book will be released in March. Paul's other books include From Compton to the Bronx, The Least Among Them, and Scattering the Ashes.
