When you watch an NFL game on TV, you normally only think about the crowd in terms of how loud they are. NFL games are always sold out, they are the talk of the media all week, and popularity of the sport continues to rise at an astronomical rate. When you watch a baseball game, the network usually shows the picture of the field and how beautiful it looks. What is blatantly obvious though, is not how loud the crowd is, but how small the crowd is. As sports leagues like the NFL and NBA continue to rise in popularity, America’s pastime, Major League Baseball has lost popularity. The overwhelming majority of people point to the pace of play, or lack thereof, and claim baseball games take too long. Although I agree with this position to a certain extent, it is very clear to me what the problem is, the regular season games do not matter.
Every regular season game counts the same so why wouldn’t every game matter? The reason is there are 162 games in baseball’s regular season. Yes, 162. Almost two times as long as the NBA season and over ten times as long as the regular season. To make a comparison, a team in the NBA could lose every game they play but if a MLB team lost 82 games, they would still have a respectable .493 winning percentage. If an NFL and MLB team both lost 16 games, the NFL team would be 0-16 at the end of the year, and the MLB team would still have 146 games left.
It is a supply and demand problem and the MLB is on the wrong side of the spectrum. On a radio show called “Mike and Mike in the Morning”, Mike Greenberg says “the NFL is the only regular season that keeps you wanting more.” In the NFL, there is one game on Thursday, one on Monday, and the rest of Sunday. In baseball there is a game every day. If there were trillions and trillions of U.S. dollars in circulation, the value of a dollar would go down compared to if there were just a few hundred billion. I am not advocating for this at all but if the MLB played just 16 games in the season, there is no doubt that people would be more interested and invested in going to those games. The games simply mean more in a shorter season and by reducing the MLB schedule, there be more importance on regular season games.
While I understand the modern baseball fans perspective in that the game needs to evolve with the time, I think the tradition in baseball is exactly what draws people to the game. You grow up hearing stories of past greats like Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Ted Williams, and you cannot but imagine what it would be like to see them play. The mind games that go on when the batter steps out of the box. The shuttle shifts in the outfield that many people may not notice but could mean the difference in catching a ball and missing it. And the best part of all, the reality that a game can change with one pitch or swing of the bat. These are just a few aspects of baseball that make it great and I think by changing the game even in small ways, would negatively impact the game and essentially ruin the great game that so many before us enjoyed.
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