My grandpa was one of the first season ticket holders with the dodgers when they first moved to LA. My father was also a huge Dodger fan, and continues to see them every chance he can (which is not that often in person, as he moved to another part of the country, but he watches them often on TV).
I've been a fan of several teams over my life, and see about 6 games a year live, and watch another 30 or so on TV.
My kids have seen about 10 games in their entire lives. We live near Boston - supposedly a baseball town - but given the late hour at which most games start, none of them has ever seen the end of a playoff or world series game. They couldn't identify Dave Roberts' famous steal in Game 4 against the Yankees, and have no idea what the "bloody sock" was.
If I watch the early innings of a regular season Red Sox game on TV, they wander off, knowing the end won't come until way after their inclination to sleep.
Not being interested in the pro game, further, seemed to limit their interest in Little League - they were average players, but didn't want to sign up after a couple years. As they enter their teens, they could not care less about baseball.
You can chalk some of it up to attention span, but the counterpoint is that one of them can name the whole roster for Barcelona's soccer team, and soccer is not exactly a scintillating sport (and I'm not exactly a fan, and he is no longer a player). The fact is my kids can often watch big soccer matches to the end (there's a time zone advantage for European games), but pretty much any baseball game they might care about starts too late for a kid on the east coast to reasonably watch to conclusion.
Hey - that's revenue maximizing in the short term according to the marketing guys.
But I think the relentless scheduling of late game time starts, above all other factors, is what really doomed any prospect of my kids ever becoming real baseball fans.
I blame sabermetrics!
Seriously, managers now read BP and see that success rates below a certain threshold (76% or something?) are counterproductive. So green lights only for those most likely to get above that threshold...
Are you sure Kurt Suzuki is the most valuable trading chip the A's have?
(They might, for example, still have a box of authentic Billy Ball decals sitting around somewhere.)
They could probably get Javier Vazquez on the cheap - chances are he will be searching for a home park with sufficient run-suppression to try to revive his (probably completely doomed) HOF pretensions...
That was my thought, too.
Check out Mark Prior's September 2003 here: http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/gl.cgi?n1=priorma01&t=p&year=2003
Six starts, with 5 of them over 124 pitches, on the way to 211 innings (and this was after taking a 24-day break in July and August) as a 22 year-old.
Another thought would be to shorten the regular season to 154 games, possibly by adding more off days. The extra gaps would also make it easier to make up rain-outs, and they could make up for some of the revenue difference by having events like letting the Triple-A affiliates play in the big league parks.
Also like the Hawaii idea that several others have suggested.
Then, if they really want to grow the sport, they would have to figure out how to give other country-league champs a shot...
I don't know. I think there's another reason for Wang's struggles: the curse of the Giambino will probably hover over the new stadium (as it did the old) for at least another 5 decades...
Playing off the Butler observation, and looking at the other extreme, Ichiro, Bradley, and Jeter are among the notable players with high collapse rates. (What would that mean, in Jeter\'s case?) Zambrano has a relatively high collapse rate among pitchers.
So in Chicago, factoring in Bradley and the \"optimistic\" Harden projection, as well, it would appear there\'s a lot of fate tempting going on up there...
Wood, Cruz, Lowe, and Abreu to win a championship?
You forgot to factor in a couple freighters-worth of magic pixie-dust. (What would that do to payroll?)
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