Recently Bill Simmons wrote a boring article about a supposedly boring subject: the Red Sox. Now, I don’t really like Simmons, but it’s fair to give him his due. He knows basketball very well and sometimes writes interesting columns on it. He used to be much better, but lots of his work has devolved into self-referential lazy work. I guess he’s focusing on his books nowadays, and that’s cool, but sometimes he finds the time to talk about other Boston sports. I guess my problem with him is that he thinks he knows a lot about sports, and seems to be interested in Sabermetrics and things of that nature, but when it comes down to it he’s really just a basketball fan with little interest and knowledge about other sports, who lives in L.A. now, and still thinks that he should keep all his Boston cred. And he relies on the same tired devices in his writing, and doesn’t look up facts or even make very cogent points.
In this article, Simmons explains why the Red Sox’s viewership in the New England area is down so much this year, and why their sellout streak may be in jeopardy in the near future. If I had to make an educated guess why, I’d say that it’s because the team started pretty slowly at the same time the Bruins and Celtics made playoff runs, and then once they began to climb back into the race, they suffered a ridiculous amount of injuries which has pushed them further back in the race, to the point that they are precariously close to being for all intents and purposes done in mid-August. But in an homage to one of my favorite blogs, Fire Joe Morgan (RIP), let’s see why Bill thinks viewers are tuning out. I’m sure it’s brilliant, given he is one of the most popular sportswriters in the world right now and he is a die-hard Red Sox fan.
On Tuesday night in Anaheim, with a teetering Red Sox season threatening to crumble, J.D. Drew saved Boston fans from another episode of “Papelbon, P.U.” by walloping a timely double. The ball bounced off the right-field wall toward Bobby Abreu, who reacted to the carom like a ghost was clubbing him from behind with a two-by-four. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (Didn’t we create the DH position for guys like Abreu? I’m almost positive we did.) Two runs scored, Boston’s eighth-inning lead expanded to three
Gee, this sounds like a pretty exciting moment here. As a baseball fan, I live for late-inning heroics like this.
and when the TV crew cut to the obligatory shot of Drew pumping his fist at second base …
Oh, wait …
I forgot. J.D. Drew never does things like that.
Why is this moment not exciting because J.D. Drew didn’t give a Jeterian fistpump? I can see it being a little less exciting, but why would you let the player’s emotion dictate how excited you get about something? Do Yankees fans jump around and hug each other when Joba strikes out someone to end the fifth inning and pumps his fist?
Also, it’s worth pointing out that just a few sentences in, the favorite target of pink hats—a phrase Simmons uses derisively later—has already been named. At this point, I know this is going to be a great article. According to Bill and prevailing pink hat wisdom, J.D. Drew is a mercenary player who chases the money (unlike guys like Curt Schilling and John Lackey), who’s always injured or too sore to play (Though he was fifth on the Red Sox in games played last year), and just plain doesn’t care about the team because he doesn’t show emotion.
He stood there impassively, handsome as always, looking the same way he always does, like the guy whose at-bat music should be Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.”
Here’s Bill’s favorite—the pop culture reference (at least it is a more recent reference than 1990)! Of course, if Bill paid more attention to the Red Sox, or had been to Fenway recently, he would probably know that J.D. Drew doesn’t actually have any music play when he comes to bat upon his request! Isn’t that more apt for a supposedly boring player than “Poker Face” would be? But no, Bill doesn’t know this, and he missed a much funnier thing to point out when trying to make a point that Drew is a bore because he hasn’t really been paying attention.
Really, he’s the perfect player for the post-2007 Red Sox regime: someone who plays hard, looks good statistically, does everything either “pretty well” or better
This sounds like a pretty good guy to have on a baseball team.
and leaves you cold. He used to have me screaming obscenities every time he took a called third strike in a big moment. Now I get him. There are no big moments for Drew. He approaches every game, every inning and every at-bat exactly the same. Expecting him to own that Anaheim moment just wasn’t realistic.
Oh. I guess because Drew isn’t emotional on the field that he has some kind of magical emotion-sucking vacuum that can suck all the joy I would normally derive from watching the Red Sox away even through the television.
Quite simply, he’s a boring player on a boring team during a fairly boring season. It’s the first Red Sox team without a truly compelling player since 1993—when we went 80-82—and even then, we had a young Mo Vaughn (29 homers, .915 OPS) and Roger Clemens launching his loathsome “I just got paid, I’m gonna start puttin’ on weight, I haven’t been introduced to performance-enhancing drugs yet and this will all culminate with me pitchin’ hard for three months three years from now, signin’ with Toronto, ‘roided up (allegedly) and winnin’ two straight Cy Youngs, then joinin’ the Yankees so I can win myself some cheap rings” stretch in which he was realizing himself as a selfish (word I can’t print), only nobody wanted to admit it yet. Really, you have to go back to 1981 (pre-Wade Boggs, post-Fred Lynn, post-Carlton Fisk) for a Red Sox team with less pizzazz than the 2010 crew.
At first I was going to cut some stuff out of this paragraph. But since I am writing a post about how poor of a column this is, I left the terrible writing in. If you don’t quite understand what Bill is saying here, you’re not alone—there’s some messy sentences in there. But I think this is what he’s saying:
“This Red Sox team doesn’t have a truly compelling player. In fact, this is the boringest Red Sox team since 1993 when they were a mediocre 80-82—oh wait, that team had Mo Vaughn and Roger Clemens. You have to go back to 1981 to find a boringer team.”
See how easy that is, Bill? Was your fake Roger Clemens quote funny to you? Because it wasn’t to anyone else.
Anyway, here is where I lost all hope this would be a decent article. What planet has Bill been living on* that these Red Sox don’t have a compelling player? Granted, I am a big fan of the team, but any reasonable baseball fan would know about Jon Lester, who had cancer late in 2006, a year later won the World Series-clinching game, threw a no-hitter the next May, and since then has been one of the five best pitchers in baseball. They’d also probably know about Dustin Pedroia, who is about 4-foot-3, swings like Jose Canseco at every pitch, and talks more smack than Kevin Garnett. Oh yeah, he has an MVP trophy too. They might have been paying attention in 2004 when David Ortiz went bonkers and won about thirty games with walk-off hits, flashing his huge, infectious smile after every one. He’s still on the team, and having a pretty good year, if his 23 homers didn’t clue you in there. There’s also Clay Buchholz, the top prospect who threw a no-hitter in his second career start, struggled the next two years, but has put it all together this year to the tune of a 2.59 ERA, second in the AL. You want emotion? There’s Kevin Youkilis, who swears up a storm every time he makes an out, and probably when he hits a double high off the wall, just missing a home run, too. And there’s Josh Beckett, who started a fight just last week by throwing inside and hitting some batters.
*Los Angeles
But hey, J.D. Drew got a big hit in a game Bill watched, didn’t show any joy, and Bill decided to write a column. Facts be damned!
On Wednesday, both Boston papers carried front-page stories about Sports Business Journal’s report that NESN’s Red Sox ratings had plummeted 36 percent. (The Boston Globe also reported that WEEI’s ratings were down 16.5 percent, and that male listeners between the ages of 25 and 54 had dwindled by 28 percent.) One morning earlier, my father and I had been on the phone trying to make sense of SBJ’s story. Neither of us was surprised, more curious. What caused it? Was there a single reason? Five reasons? Ten reasons? Was it a fluke or a sign of something more substantial?
It’s probably because they started 4-9, were already six games back in the standings, and haven’t been close since except for a couple weeks in June, at about the same time the Celtics were in the NBA Finals. There’s others (warm weather this year, injuries taking fan favorites out of the lineup) but that’s probably the main reason. People like to watch winning teams.
“I don’t think there’s any one reason,” Dad said. “Don’t do the thing where you write a column and try to figure it out. There’s no one thing to figure out. This is too complicated.”
Bill’s dad was right. You should listen to your dad. He’s older and wiser than you. But you didn’t do that, now did you?
So Simmons makes a pie chart:
INJURIES: 10 PERCENT
The following things are absolutely true:
It’s really like 50% or more. If the Red Sox had a normal number of injuries to a normal distribution of players, keeping them out a normal amount of time, does anyone think they would be seven games out? Heck no, they’d be right in it. (I’ll also note that if they were three games out right now, while they may not have a great shot at making up those three games, it would seem like they were a lot closer and a lot more people would be watching.) But OK. What’s absolutely true, Bill?
Team heartthrob Jacoby Ellsbury collided with Adrian Beltre on a pop-up April 11 and injured his ribs … and we haven’t seen him since, save for a three-game stretch in May in which he reinjured his ribs. Although maybe they were always injured, and Ellsbury’s side certainly thinks so, which is why he read a statement accusing Boston’s medical staff of misdiagnosing the fractures, and as that was happening, his teammates were subtly maligning him for not coming to games. And by the way, when this soap opera becomes the most compelling storyline of the season, you know the season sucked. I have absolutely no doubt that we’ll trade Ellsbury this winter and he’ll steal 230 bases in San Diego or Houston next season.
Ellsbury blah blah blah, we know this story. I don’t see the soap opera as very interesting—I preferred the games being played on the field, like when Daniel Nava hit a grand slam in his first at-bat, but…wait, Houston?! You think he will get traded to Houston? I know that’s sort of a throwaway line, but there is absolutely no way ANYONE is going to get traded to Houston. They just PAID MONEY to get rid of their best players. They won’t take a guy anywhere near his arbitration years, nor should they. Please pay attention to baseball if you are going to write about it.
Mike Cameron missed five weeks with an abdomen injury, then struggled upon his return. Or, he might just be really old. Or both.
Or he may have been playing hurt, which makes sense since he is now back on the DL with the same injury after saying that it hadn’t healed fully.
We signed Cameron for his defense, which would have been fine if he wasn’t 37 and moving like me after I sit on the sofa for too long and can’t get loose. Like all Sox fans, I watched Cameron play outfield in April thinking, “Wait a second, I thought this guy was supposed to be good?” and feeling like I’d been duped.
He’s good when he’s healthy. Like one of the best-fielding outfielders of my lifetime good. We have 15 years of data and observations about this, but he was playing for Seattle, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee so you probably didn’t notice.
(And yes, advanced metrics back this up: According to FanGraphs, he’s been one of the league’s worst starting center fielders in baseball with a UZR of -8.0 in 2010.)Cameron also can’t hit.
While playing through an abdominal tear.
And he’s one of those guys who looks old—like, when you’re watching him stand on second base, you make jokes like, “I wonder whether he still keeps in touch with old teammate Satchel Paige’s family” and “I forget; did Cameron integrate the American League in the early ’50s, or was that Larry Doby?” The good news: Well, I can’t think of anything right now.
Cameron is black, I guess is what we’re supposed to take from this? Weird observation.
(Note: This one hurts because every baseball fan instinct I had told me this past winter, “We should sign Johnny Damon. I don’t care if he’s an oil spill in the outfield. He’ll hit, he’ll get on base, he’ll give us 650 ABs and he knows how to handle Boston.” Then new Sabermetric Me shouted down Old-School Me, and force-fed Cameron’s UZR down my throat, even though my friends who rooted for him in Seattle and New York steadily maintained that they’d rather see a waterlogged corpse batting in a big spot than Cameron. What’s weird is that the only stat that ultimately mattered was “37.” So be it. At least we didn’t sign him for next season, too.)
(What? We did?)
The same Johnny Damon who has played 57 games at DH and just 34 in the outfield this year? You think we should have signed him to a team that already has two DHs? This isn’t a Sabermetrics thing, it’s a common sense thing. Damon is a DH at this point in his career. What’s weird is that Damon is 36, a year younger than Cameron. Pretty crazy.
Also, there’s nothing in Cameron’s history that suggests he won’t be a solid defender once recovered FROM THE INJURY THAT HE HAS BEEN PLAYING THROUGH ALL SEASON BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE ON THE TEAM WAS HURT.
Through Wednesday’s games, Darnell McDonald and Bill Hall had a combined 422 at-bats for Boston. Throw in Daniel Nava (91), Eric Patterson (50) and Cash (47), and we’re over 600. Add Jeremy Hermida (155 ABs, .617 OPS), poor Mike Lowell (80 ABs, .658 OPS) and Brown/Molina/Reilly, and that’s 850 at-bats that should have happened for bottom feeders like the Royals, Pirates, Astros, Orioles or Diamondbacks, not a big-market team with $150 million to spend every season. Which brings us to our next factor …
Well, sort of. Injure six members of the Yankees’ starting lineup, as well as two important backups and their two catchers in AAA and they’ll be trotting out some crappy players too. The thing about backups is that if they were good, they would be playing full-time for someone. No one wants to sit on the bench for a winner when they could start for another team. Not even True Yankees like Aaron Boone.
And you could say the Yankees signed more durable players, but that’s not really true either. Pedroia, Varitek, and Martinez were hurt on foul balls. Ellsbury and Hermida were hurt when Beltre collided with them. The most injury-prone guy on the Red Sox, J.D. Drew, hasn’t been seriously hurt this year. So there’s that.
FRONT-OFFICE PARALYSIS/INADEQUACIES: 5 PERCENT
A few days ago, the following rant appeared on the Boston Dirt Dogs site:
Ahh, Boston Dirt Dogs. It makes sense that you would read that, Bill.
” … can’t believe the front office just fiddled this summer while Rome burned and we flushed an entire season and $150M down the toilet by thinking we could tread water with Bill Hall playing second and Kevin Cash catching and David Ortiz batting third against lefties and J.D. Drew playing every day against lefties and Eric Patterson and Daniel Nava and Dusty Brown, et al. It was so [expletive] obvious when the Laser Show and V-Mart got hurt that we had to go get a real bat, Jason Werth level, who would still start when we got healthy, but instead we did [expletive] nothing and buried ourselves. It was like we had no front office, the Jack Hannahan blockbuster notwithstanding.”—An understandably apoplectic Kevin H. on the lost season
So, yeah, this is a rant. No reasonable person would agree that they should mortgage the future and trade a prospect for Jayson Werth (if he was ever even available), thus putting either Mike Cameron or Ellsbury out of a job when they returned from their injuries. That wouldn’t make Ellsbury very happy, now would it? Bill, you can see that this post doesn’t have much reason, behind it, right?
Yup. It was Hench. I couldn’t disagree.
Oh.
Team Theo’s lack of urgency as the injuries mounted was appalling—on July 3, after the Pedroia/Martinez double whammy, we were still a half-game behind New York and 1½ games ahead of Tampa—as was this past winter’s much-ballyhooed commitment to defense that ignored Cameron’s advanced age and the seemingly crucial fact that Martinez couldn’t throw out Aretha Franklin at this point. I mean, if you’re gearing everything around pitching and defense, shouldn’t you have a catcher who … I don’t know … is good at defense?
Martinez isn’t great, but he seems to be alright at defense. He had a poor start throwing runners out but has rebounded and his numbers for the year are now 20%. That’s not great, but steals are generally overrated. Also, Mike Cameron PLAYED HURT ALL YEAR.
Then again, we knew it could be a transition year. With the starting rotation locked down for $22 kajillion, flamethrower Daniel Bard ready to close in 2011 and $33.3 million of Ortiz/Lowell/Papelbon dropping off the payroll this winter,
Uh, small point, but this is incorrect. Papelbon makes $9.35 million this year, but he won’t be a free agent until after next year. He’ll likely receive another contract for around $10 million. He’s not dropping off the payroll unless they trade him. Most Red Sox fans know this. I just called my dad and he knew this.
the team’s 2010 goal was pretty transparent: hope to strike oil with the pitching/defense formula, don’t take on any dumb long-term contracts, save money for a franchise hitter this winter. With one exception (Adrian Beltre, a short-term signing of one of my fantasy kryptonite guys that exceeded even my expectations), none of this past winter’s gambles totally panned out. And Epstein isn’t finding bargain veterans (Ortiz, Kevin Millar, Bill Mueller, etc.) like he once did. He’s been on a steady run of Bill Halls for three solid years.
Well, there was Billy Wagner and Takashi Saito last year, who pitched very well and netted the Red Sox some draft picks when they signed elsewhere in the offseason. Beltre is a pretty big “hit” as he has been the best 3B in the league this year. But yeah, besides those he hasn’t found any FA bargains in three years. Of course, there hasn’t been many open spots to fill as the team has been pretty much set, but hey, Theo blew it.
The bigger issue: For all their bluster about building a monster farm system, the Red Sox aren’t exactly teeming with can’t-miss prospects. Yeah, they suffered a horrible blow when Ryan Westmoreland, their best hitting prospect, underwent life-threatening brain surgery. But take it from a guy in an obsessive, ultradorky AL-only keeper league with a 25-pick minor league draft and a full farm system:
Oooooh, this guy must know his prospects!
Boston’s pool of minor leaguers, while deep with yeah-he-might-make-it guys (Ryan Kalish, Stolmy Pimentel, Anthony Rizzo and Julio Iglesias, to name four), has only one certified stud, pitcher Casey Kelly (although he’s not on the uber-stud level of Tampa’s Jeremy Hellickson or Texas’ Martin Perez). Only one Boston prospect made the 2010 Futures Game (Pimentel), and only Kelly cracked Baseball America’s midseason top 50. For a franchise that devoted so much money and energy these past few years toward invigorating its farm system—and struck oil with the Pedroia/Ellsbury/Papelbon/Bard/Lester class a few years ago—the 2010 results have been sobering so far.
(Note: ESPN’s Keith Law had Boston ranked as his No. 2 farm system in February. When I e-mailed him for a July update, he wrote back that many of its top guys were underperforming and added, “They’re not No. 2 anymore. Definitely still top-10.” I’m not pumping my fist.)
It’s fair to say that the Red Sox’s top prospects have for the most part been unimpressive this year (You did fail to mention Ryan Kalish’s meteoric rise). But of the major league players (Pedroia et al.) you mentioned above, none dominated the minors, nor were any ranked very high by most ratings before they came up. Maybe the Red Sox are good at finding late bloomers. Maybe they have their prospects work on different things in the minors and not worry about their minor league performance. Also, with a team that has consistent major league success, they’re not going to have any top-ten picks in the draft (and rarely pick in the top 20). That makes it tough to add the ultra-prospects to the organization, and lots of times you have guys with some kind of flaw that causes them to be underrated. Like, oh, Pedroia’s size, for example.
At the same time, you can blame Epstein (and Boston’s owners) for ignoring a simple law of entertainment these past two seasons: Just like you can’t open a blockbuster movie without a star, you can’t expect a nine-figure baseball team to capture the daily imagination of a big market without a player who passes the Remote Control Test (when you don’t flip channels because you know Player X is coming up) or the We Can’t Go Get Food Yet Test (when you don’t make a food/drink run at a game because Player X is coming up) or even the Every Five Nights, I Know What I’m Doing Test (when you have a transcendent pitcher who keeps you in front of the television every five days).
They don’t? What about Pedroia? What about Lester? What about Buchholz? Youkilis? Those guys are all Cy Young and MVP candidates. What more do you want?
I like Pedroia. I like Kevin Youkilis. Clay Buchholz has been a revelation this year. I really, really like Lester, my favorite current player (and someone quietly enjoying a monster season) mainly for everything he’s been through. But none of them passes the above tests.
Really? You’re stretching here, dude.
I went to a Philly-Boston game in June in which we shelled Jamie Moyer for something like 30 runs in the first two innings. Philly pulled Ryan Howard in the third. We were crushed. Dammit! We only got to see Howard hit once! The 2010 Red Sox don’t have a pitcher or hitter who generates that reaction. It’s true.
Ryan Howard? He’s good, but Youkilis is better. What exactly do you like about Howard? He seems like a run-of-the-mill slugger, albeit a particularly good one. He kind of hits like Ortiz—they’re both powerful big lefties. I much prefer watching Pedroia’s huge swing and massive plate coverage, or Youkilis’s ridiculous batting stance.
THE HANGOVER: 15 PERCENT
It’s been the elephant in the room for three years. Do I care as much as I did? I think about this question constantly. The short answer? No. It can’t mean as much. It will never mean as much. Before 2004, rooting for the Red Sox wasn’t about just sports.
In the interest of space, I’m going to skip this part and just respond with this sentence:
The Curse was invented by Dan Shaughnessey to sell books.
Plus, people didn’t watch in the ’90s, when the curse was still big and strong. Why? Because the team was mediocre.
THE BANDWAGON EFFECT: 5 PERCENT
The bandwagoners who showed up post-2004 (the Pink Hat Brigade), coupled with the owners shrewdly turning Fenway (and the blocks surrounding it) into a cash cow on par with Facebook and the Kardashian family, coupled with the experience of attending home games (not the same) … yup, it’s made it a little less fun for die-hards.
Who are the die-hards in this article? The guy who thinks Pedroia isn’t compelling? The guy who was most excited about seeing Ryan Howard? The guy who moved to Los Angeles?
Just a little. Living in California now, I had been getting a steady stream of e-mails about the devolving Fenway experience
Yeah, I miss pissing into a trough. I REALLY hate those plastic seats. Bring me back the tiny wooden ones that cut off the circulation to my legs, please. You know what’s awful? The right field roof deck. And the Monster seats! What a crappy view! And I really hate having better food choices in the stadium. That sucks!
and kept thinking, “Come on, it can’t be that bad.” Then I attended my first home game in two years (the Philly blowout) and was flabbergasted when everyone stopped standing for Boston runs. Apparently the 7-0 lead was good enough; nobody stood for runs 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12.
Dude, that’s called a blowout. People stop paying attention. Show me a stadium where people are as rapt when their team is up 7-0 in a mid-season game as when the score is tied.
But when they cranked “Sweet Caroline” in the eighth inning? Everyone stood and sang.
Look, I don’t want to be Grumpy Old Man. I really don’t. But I probably attended 100 Fenway games just from 1998 to 2002; the level of baseball sophistication in the stands was unparalleled.
“Ah yes, what a fine summer’s eve we have here. Don’t you agree, Winston?”
“Indubitably! Why, it reminds me of the first day I saw dear Old Hoss Radbourn pitch!”
We worked with Pedro like Frick and Frack. He did his job (rolling through lineups); we did ours (standing every time he got two strikes on someone, doing the steady clap to get him fired up, cheering him like a Roman gladiator). That’s gone now.
Unless Pedro was pitching a no-hitter or it was near the end of the game, there’s no way you all stood and clapped every time he got two strikes on someone. Not to mention, that’s really annoying. In a playoff game? Maybe, and I think you’d still see that. But no one cares enough about one of the 162 regular season games to do this. You’re exaggerating, poorly.
The Murph and Sullys are trapped in the bleachers, right-field hell and crappy grandstand seats. It’s depressing. Or, maybe that’s just the way professional sports works now—casual fans, non-fans, and connected people snap up every good seat, and that’s just where we are. Either way … f—-. A month later, and I still can’t believe I went to a Red Sox game where the fans didn’t stand and cheer Boston runs. I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.
As they say on Sons of Sam Horn, “lol boo hoo.”
Anyway, bandwagon fans ebb and flow as TV viewers depending on entertainment value, and this season hasn’t been so entertaining. There’s some of your 36 percent.
If by “entertaining” you mean “in first place,” then, yes. You’re right. People tuned out when the team fell behind in the standings.
THE STEROID ERA HANGOVER: 5 PERCENT
Yawn. Here he says a bunch of stuff about how he can’t view the guys from 1988 to 2008 (puzzlingly stopping there, even though testing was implemented earlier, and people are probably still using) without applying “the steroid era” to them. I’m probably more tired of arguing about this than just about anything else, so I’m going to skip most of it. Actually, all of it. It’s all stupid. Steroids are no different from any other “era,” whether it’s dead ball, pre-integration, expansion, lowering the pitcher’s mound…it’s just another effect that people who are smart have figured out how to account for.
THE DECLINE OF BASEBALL IN GENERAL: 5 PERCENT
MLB’s defenders will point to attendance numbers (dropped in 2008, held tight in 2009 and 2010), its history (by far the most significant of the four major sports), its World Series ratings (still better than the NBA Finals) and a new generation of younger-than-25 stars (Strasburg, Heyward, Price, Longoria, Posey, Santana, etc.) who rank among baseball’s biggest talent boons ever.
I’ll also point out that baseball has its highest revenues ever. Attendance is a big portion of that, but they’re also doing a good job with MLB.TV, the MLB Network, and both national and local TV contracts. They’re making a ton of money.
Troublemakers like me will point to the following things: The attendance numbers didn’t keep plummeting only because of discount deals and cheaper tickets.
So? A ticket sold is a ticket sold. Also plenty of parks are sold out for just about every game, and those parks are charging their highest prices ever, so I am pretty dubious about this statement. Seriously, $120 a pop for field box seats at Fenway? That’s some serious scrilla.
Shouldn’t baseball worry that the onslaught of new ballparks (20 since the Skydome in 1989) caused an ongoing attendance bump that’s soon coming to an end? The honeymoon “we have a new park!” stage eventually wore off in Baltimore, Cleveland, Toronto, and Houston. Who’s next? When the dust settles, attendance will hinge on the same thing it always did: winning. Especially in the 65-Inch HD Plasma/DirecTV Package/”Screw It, I’d Rather Just Stay Home and Flick Channels” Era … which will become THE long-term problem if they don’t solve the time issue (more on this in a second.) And what happens if the big-market/small-market chasm keeps growing?
The attendance jump wasn’t just due to the new parks. Baseball is more popular than ever, it has a better product on the field than ever, and people are spending more money on it than ever before, in many different ways.
Bill has a point that attendance hinges on winning, and that the nostalgia of a new stadium quickly wears off if a team doesn’t put a winning product on the field. But there are always going to be winners and losers, and thanks to the wild card more teams are in the playoffs each year, and even more importantly, more teams than ever before are in the race for the playoffs each year. There will always be some lousy franchises, but more fans have a reason to watch in September now than they ever did.
There isn’t a single baseball star who could have gotten a 4 rating for switching teams, much less a 9 rating like LeBron did.
Well, that’s because whichever team gets LeBron basically is guaranteed a shot at a championship. No one player can have this much effect in baseball, as I wrote about earlier.
Right now, Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez are the only mainstream famous baseball players.
Hmm…maybe? But who cares, if baseball has its highest revenues ever? Obviously people come to see the teams and not necessarily a star player.
My goofy take on this: The narcissism, chest-pounding and me-first mentality of stars in other sports has, perhaps unfairly, made baseball players seem boring as hell. You respect The Code in baseball. You play the game. You don’t show people up. You win respect by proving you’re about the team. Just look at what happened to poor A-Rod in New York—within eight years, they drummed out every interesting quality he had. It’s like listening to a robot. I am just happy to be a Yankee. I just want to win. Please recharge my battery; I am running low.
This is kind of like Bill’s opening point about Boring Old J.D. Drew. Do people watch LeBron because he throws up a bunch of chalk dust before games? Or do they watch him because he is one of the best players to ever play basketball? I think it’s silly when players get flak for “showing up” another team, but it doesn’t really make me any less interested in the players themselves. Most importantly, baseball fans don’t really root for personalities—they root for teams. Having an exciting player isn’t going to bring fans to the stadium. Winning is. For the hundredth time.
Hell, even when George Steinbrenner died, the ensuing coverage reminded us of that gloriously crazy era in the ’70s and ’80s when players wrote tell-all books and ripped teammates…pitchers beaned guys just for sport, guys took 26-second home run trots, teams had bench-clearers five times per year and everything else that made baseball so much fun.
That stuff is all fun and cool, I guess, but baseball didn’t really make very much money or have very much attendance in the ’70s or ’80s. So if having a lot of controversial off-field stuff piqued fans’ interest in watching the games themselves, I don’t see it.
Now, it’s all about RESPECTING THE GAME, MAN! Which is fine…It’s the Look At Me/Instant Gratification/Twitter/Snooki/Lady Gaga generation … and poor baseball fits in about as well as Bud Selig at a Drake concert.
Awesome recent pop culture reference #2! Bill has been reading Perez Hilton, guys!
We’re feeling the effects of two solid decades of World Series games ending well after the bedtime of any prospective young fan. And don’t kids have dozens more choices in 2010 than they did in 1975? Back in 1975, I went outside, whipped a baseball off the wall, dove for it and pretended I was Freddie Lynn. Do kids do that now? Isn’t it more likely that they’re watching Nick Jr., playing video games, watching DVDs, messing around with the computer … how could baseball possibly mean as much to a young kid now?
Well, there are more little league players than ever before…and there’s the fact that baseball’s pretty popular in the rest of the world. But yeah, I guess the youth of this country have other things to do.
Especially when …
THE TIME OF THE GAMES: 55 PERCENT
The biggie. The hammer. The killer.
There are two separate issues here. The first: Nobody wants to spend 3½ hours watching anything on television. Not even porn. The second: It’s not that fun to spend 30-45 minutes driving to a game, paying for parking, parking, waiting in line to get in, finding your seat … and then, spend the next three-plus hours watching people play baseball … and then, leave, find your car and drive home. That’s potentially a five-hour commitment. Ludicrous.
Wait, wait here. If you’re going to a game, it was already a four- or so hour commitment at best. And since there’s no time limit it could be longer—you just don’t know. And that’s the nice thing about baseball. It’s a way to spend a nice summer evening or Sunday afternoon and not worry about time. In fact I’d say that’s one of its main pluses. Is Bill one of those morons who leaves early?
By the way, have you ever looked around during a baseball game these days? It’s 35,000 people texting or writing/reading e-mails while they wait for something to happen. BlackBerrys and cell phones were either the best or the worst thing that ever happened to baseball. I can’t decide. When an incoming text is more exciting than a baseball at-bat, something has gone horribly wrong.
I’m sure this isn’t the case during downtime at any other sporting event in the country. No way.
Back in 2002, I wrote a column worrying about baseball and that games were too long. It’s much worse now. I tried to tell my father this, and he didn’t believe me. Fortunately, baseballreference.com has the times of every baseball game played. I went back and examined the times of games of my most memorable Red Sox seasons (1975, 1978, 1986, 1999, 2004, 2007) along with 2002 (when we first worried that games were becoming too slow) and 2010 (through 101 games). Check this out; it’s incredible.
Here I’ve snipped a bunch of analysis that actually is pretty good and does suggest that games have gotten longer, though he cuts it into broad categories and takes samples of arbitrary single years instead of calculating the median or mean and standard deviation and using larger samples. But yeah, games have gotten longer. I bet there are more commercials during games now than there were in 1975, or even 1986, but Bill doesn’t mention this. There’s also more offense, and the Red Sox are a very patient and successful team. They like to avoid outs. And since the only clock in baseball is the out, well, their games are going to be long.
(Shaking my head.)
What a nightmare. I’m the same guy who once created the 150-Minute Rule for all movies, sporting events, concerts, even sex—if you edge past 150 minutes for anything, you better have a really good reason. The 2010 Boston Red Sox have played one game in four months that ended in less than 150 minutes.
I’ll write that again: The 2010 Boston Red Sox have played one game in four months that ended in less than 150 minutes.
I think this is the main thing that bugs me about Simmons’s writing: his hyperbole. It’s just unnecessary, whiny, and doesn’t help his point. Not to mention the 150-minute rule is incredibly stupid. Did he hate the Bulls/Celtics first-round series that had triple-overtimes in multiple games? I’m sure he was just as excited as everyone else, even though those games were long (Game 6 was 3 hours and 56 minutes). Heck, if you’re going to make it a 150-minute rule, he’s disqualifying most NBA playoff games, as even those that finish in regulation are nearly three hours!
Nearly 60 percent of the Red Sox’s games have dragged past three hours. Twenty-four of their games have gone 3:30 or longer (nearly 25 percent). And no, it’s not just them: Fifty-eight percent of 2010 Yankees games have extended past three hours. When these two meandering monoliths collide, look out: This year’s snoozefests clocked in at 3:46, 3:48, 3:21, 3:01, 3:56, 3:05, 3:47 and 4:09 (a nine-inning game!). Are those baseball games or Boston Marathon times?
I talked about this in my anti-Joe West post, but these two teams are the teams with the two best offenses in the league, both based around avoiding outs. They’re also two of the best teams in the league and are in the top seven in attendance, as measure both by sheer number of fans and by percentage of stadium capacity filled. So if the long games are a problem, people don’t really care except for Bill Simmons. And yet Bill thinks he needs to write three million words about it.
Meanwhile, National League games move significantly faster: Every NL team has played at least 50 percent of its 2010 games in less than three hours,
led by St. Louis, who cranked out 71 of its 102 games in less than three hours. That tells me the following things:
The NL lets pitchers hit, which makes the games about 11% faster since pitchers get a free out every nine players?
1. We need to dump the DH. Like, right now. It’s stupid, anyway.
Oh. Wait, so you want me to watch pitchers stand and watch strikes go by, or fail in sacrifice bunting, or strike out swinging, or pop up, just because you are tired of watching a game you purport to enjoy?
2. We’re only a few other tweaks away from getting these games to a manageable time. What about giving managers six timeouts during a game in which they can cross the baseline, and that’s it?
Six? That would be like, the normal amount of times any non-LaRussa manager goes to the mound for a game. If you’re coming up with ridiculous ideas at least make them effective.
What about a 15-second pitch-clock? What about giving hitters three seconds to leave the batter’s box, or it’s another strike? (Unless you’ve tipped a ball off your foot, caught something in your eye or desperately need to adjust your boys.) What about two minutes between half-innings for commercials, then the next hitter has to be standing in the batter’s box at 2:01?
The commercials thing is the first good point Simmons has made! Just shaving one commercial off of each break would cut about ten minutes off each game. It’s so easy. You know why soccer games are a brief 2 hours? BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE 3-MINUTE BREAKS 18 TIMES A GAME!
Yikes, I’m starting to sound like Bill.
Look, we could throw out unrealistic suggestions like “no baserunner can take a lead past a defined line within 7 feet of the base” (to eliminate pickoff throws); “every batter needs to bring a second bat to the on-deck circle” (in case he breaks the first one); “relievers don’t get to warm up;” “catchers can visit the mound only once per inning;” “we wire the area around the home plate and electrocute batters any time they step out to adjust their elbow pads or their crotch;” and even “let’s eliminate the ninth inning all together and just play eight.” But really, just the four tweaks from the previous paragraph would save 30-35 minutes per game. Easily.
Of just the commercial thing would save 10-15 minutes. I am dubious the other things would save very much time at all.
The most damning fact about these interminably long games? They pushed some die-hard fans toward English Premier League and World Cup games mainly because we knew those games would end in less than two hours. (Yes, you’re reading one of them.)
Oh hey, I said that.
Like you, I have a lot of crap going on. I have a job (no, really, they pay me for this), I have a wife, I have kids, I have a bunch of things I like to watch at night. Slogging through a 3-hour, 45-minute anything just isn’t entertaining. We have too many choices in 2010. That, over anything else, is why those NESN ratings dropped in 2010.
The big question? Will Bud Selig do something about it?
He’s the same guy who apparently enjoys this big-market/small-market dichotomy. He’s the same guy who looked the other way as his players were growing 26-inch biceps and second jaws. He’s the same guy who doesn’t seem to care that every World Series game ends past the bedtimes of his future paying customers, or that his fans are paying triple figures for all-you-can-watch baseball packages that somehow get blacked out on Saturday afternoons, or that baseball is the only professional sport that doesn’t allow YouTube clips (because God forbid people would want to celebrate the game). So I’m dubious.
I do think Selig cares a little; if he didn’t, baseball wouldn’t have made such a concerted effort to reduce prices for families. Three facts since the economy went south: 87 percent of MLB clubs now offer tickets for $10 or less; 80 percent of MLB clubs now offer price reductions on merchandise and concessions; and 57 percent of the clubs now offer tickets for $5.50 or less on a regular basis. Team Selig has done a terrific job of keeping fans coming to ballparks. Now it should start worrying about keeping them awake.
So, this conclusion is alright, but it’s totally out of left field. I thought this article was about the Red Sox and why you didn’t care so much anymore. At first it was because J.D. Drew didn’t pump his fist, and then you started talking about some other stupid reasons, but I guess the whole point of the article was that the games are too long?
I guess you don’t really care about this, Bill, because you’re just a normal Sports Guy or it’s your shtick to be a lousy writer or maybe you just don’t care anymore, but when I was in college, you know, learning how to write, they taught me to introduce the point of what I was saying early in my essay so that people wouldn’t be blindsided by it later, or be confused as to what I was actually trying to get across. They taught me to introduce well researched facts that helped my argument, and to eschew meaningless anecdotes and personal opinions. They even showed me this cool thing called an outline that helps you organize your thoughts so it was easier to tell where you were coming from, where you were going, and why the reader should care about what you’re saying.
But, hey, you came up with the Ewing theory, so what do I know.
