I mean, hat were you doing this weekend? Heading back to school. Mowing the lawn. Wondering whether or not the girl serving you at Coldstone is 14 or 18, and then deciding that you’d just rather not know. Watching the PGA Championship maybe, not without its intrigue.
(Is it just me, or is Tiger Woods to the PGA Tour what that six-foot-eight 256 pound “boy” is to the Little League World Series. I’m sorry, your name is Aaron Durley and you play for which city? Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. That makes sense. Aaron Durley. How many two meter tall blacks named “Aaron” are there in Saudi Arabia? My guess is one. Dhahran must have a damn good recruitment program. Their prospects look better than just about every player in a National League farm system.)
Anyway, my point is that most people probably weren’t watching baseball. As a nation we are programmed to systematically lose interest after the always disappointing All-Star Game, in preparation for better things to come. Namely: football, basketball, and the games this country really cares about. It’s not that we don’t like baseball, it suits us just fine – that is, when we can sift through all the hoopla surrounding investigations and trainers and mascots getting hit with bats and steroids and a record that really isn’t nearly as important as everyone thinks it is.
Speaking of that: Look, when Henry Aaron surpassed Babe Ruth as the most prolific homerun hitter of all time, it automatically meant that we would remember and honor him more than the Babe, right? Wrong. The record doesn’t mean anything. I’m not a real fan of either Babe or Hank; I never saw either of them play. Sure, I know that they were good. I also know that Ruth drank like an ugly college freshman girl seeking acceptance at a lesser fraternity full of guys who are also seeking acceptance by means of hooking up with unattractive freshman girls. The Bambino was probably also single-handedly responsible for the death of over 7,000 cows, as sadly they lay in the way on his quest for satiation. All this crops up in my head when I think about him, just like, whenever I think about Barry Bonds, I remember that when I was a little kid, he was a damn good baseball player. I know he’s hit a crapload of homeruns, but I also know that he probably took some form of anabolic steroids/human growth hormone/low-grade panda bear tranquilizer during some portion of his career. Possibly right around the time he went from being an athlete to looking like the offspring of a large-headed bear and Andre the Giant. You can forget the talk about putting an asterisk next to whatever final total he comes to, because that asterisk is already there, inside every baseball fan’s head.
Sorry, I didn’t really want to talk about that. I wanted to talk about baseball and how nobody really gives a damn about it in this generation. When I say nobody, I naturally exclude myself and the handful of people who call themselves fans out there. We come in four basic flavors. Some of us truly love the game. Some of us are a breed of sports junkie that needs a constant fix and doesn’t know where else to get it during June and July. Then there are the guys who enjoy going to the ballpark for the whole “event” aspect of it, but they leave in the bottom of the 6th to “beat the traffic”, and when they get home they forget who was even playing five minutes into their Friends rerun on TBS. And finally there’s the whole city of Boston, probably still butt-bruised that a couple of rapscallions ruined all that good tea, that Washington D.C. became the nation’s capital, and that they have a city population lower than those of Jacksonville, Milwaukee, and (I swear to God) El Paso.
But seriously, not that many people care about baseball anymore. Last year’s match-up between the White Sox and the Astros garnered the worst Ratings in World Series history. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise, as baseball’s postseason ratings have been in a decline for quite some time (World Series Ratings courtesy of the Baseball Almanac). The WS earned a Nielsen Rating of just over 11, while the most recent Superbowl hauled in a whopping 41.6, which has been around the norm since the old John Elway days. Now I know that the Superbowl is just one game, so viewers are consolidated, but then again the MLB gets multiple nights to pull in viewers and still can’t seem to attract that many. Hell, an NFL exhibition game between the Redskins and the Bengals the other week drew a rating of 8.7. And that’s a practice game!
The numbers aren’t out yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Red Sox/Yankees series fared poorly this weekend, especially after the first couple of massacres…err…games. It didn’t help that the aforementioned Little League World Series had like 86 games that no one cared about clogging up a majority of ESPN’s programming, or that the five game spread had to run against Tiger and company. But still, if this rivalry can’t sell anymore (their 2004 face-off in the ALCS earned a whopping 27+ rating for game seven) then baseball might just be doomed. Because let’s face it, as much as I love my Tigers…does a battle between Detroit and (oh let’s say) Cincinnati sound appealing to very many people? And I’ll be honest, if a baseball game conflicts with an NFL, NCAA, or NBA game, it’s fighting a battle it can’t win in my mind.
In closing, I doubt if baseball will ever be able to be “America’s Sport” again. In a world of broadband internet, Hot Pockets, and 14 year old Coldstone employees who use trickery to fool you into thinking they could be 22, I think the game might be just a little bit too slow.