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Shimrra Jamaane posted:I mean, it’s not a hot take that baseball has seriously declined in national popularity with the explosion of the NFL and NBA. It’s still big in certain individual markets but it’s really suffering among the younger demos. The local Red Sox games get some hilarious ratings numbers where like 90% of the viewers are over 60. I wonder how much of it is broadcasting related. On The Media made a comment that reminded me of baseball the other week, when they mentioned that advertising boycotts of Fox News are only marginally successful because the channel doesn't even need advertising due to how much blood they extract per cable subscriber even if that subscriber abhors everything about the network. This of course is how baseball works with nobody in the stadium. Cable is in this death spiral of older folks who either want to "watch the game" or want to watch politics slack-jawed like a sport that never takes a season off, and they're increasingly paying for each other's content and getting more and more mad. Everybody who wants serialized programming has already left for a streaming network. (I told my Dad, who has always disliked all sports and says he "doesn't have the Sports Gene", that his addiction to cable news and hot takes about the latest Senator voting this way or that is completely analogous to the sports fan experience, but he didn't get it because one is life or death, war or peace stuff while the other is men hitting ball with bludgeon.) Most NFL games are on either CBS or Fox, if you're a fan of the Browns then you spent a lot of seasons until very recently never being featured in a national broadcast so I guess that's the exception but even then I think it's just CBS or Fox running a regional game. Most people in major areas can pick up a local affiliate with an antenna or for a small fee. The NBA uses RSNs, but people from all sorts of teams seem to think that NBA on TNT is far better than their homer announcers. I've spent significant time in both MLB and NHL fandoms, the latter not as much in recent years but both leagues are very heavily reliant on RSNs particularly hockey since ESPN never gave the NHL the time of day, and in both leagues having to listen to national broadcast announcers like Joe Buck or Matt Vasgersian do play by play seems to be like pulling teeth to most markets. Fox has almost figured out how to create a TNT-like atmosphere for baseball by putting A-Rod and Big Papi on a panel together, since those are two popular players known pretty much everywhere. Maybe it's just that baseball fans are more sensitive to quality broadcasting because the game gives you so much dead-air time to fill. Vin Scully left NBC to focus on Dodgers home pbp in 1989. Jon Miller left ESPN in 2010. Seems like the national play by play booth has suffered since. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 4, 2021 20:32
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Boston still has a roster that many other cities fans would be thrilled to have. It just looks bad because of big market expectations. Whereas I think the Cubs are just getting ready to implode everything, and the only sad thing is I think they’re doing it because they’re cheap and not to prevent themselves from driving into the same ditch the Giants did last decade. Shimrra Jamaane posted:I watched the 4 hour Jon Bois video on the Marines over the last week and dang. The interesting thing about that video to me is how he footnotes Nintendo owning that team. And it’s weird because the very next thing that happens is shaking down the taxpayer for Safeco Field under threats to leave for Florida or something. I don’t know how it was covered at the time, but Nintendo was a Seattle-based branch of a Japanese company that had no real organization outside of the northwest. I always got the sense they bought the team so the Japanese executives could continue to watch MLB on business trips. I always wondered if it may also have played a role in landing Ichiro and creating interest in the team abroad. If nothing else, it certainly didn’t hurt. EDIT: Glad that the NL DH is gone again so I can finally get an avatar change soon. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Mar 5, 2021 |
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Mar 5, 2021 02:44
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One for the Dodgers fans: https://twitter.com/theathletic/status/1370136266231013379
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Mar 12, 2021 03:23
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