As the weather cools down and baseball season approaches October, a number of playoff races are heating up. The Yankees and Rays, the two best teams in the league, are battling for the AL East crown while the Padres, Giants and Rockies are separated by only 2.5 games in the NL West as of Wednesday night. Unfortunately, all the excitement on the field this season hasn’t translated into good attendance figures.
America’s national pastime has seen the number of fans attending games slip—through Aug. 31, MLB attendance was down 0.9 percent from 2009—while only three teams in the American League saw increases. After a decrease of over six percent in 2009, this trend should be worrisome to league officials.
The length of games, the lack of superstars, and the small number of home runs have all made it harder to capture the interest of the casual fan, the demographic that the teams’ profits depend on. Die-hards will always go to games and will always watch them on TV because they love baseball. But the casual fan is there for entertainment.
It is hard to be entertained when the average time of a baseball game is 2 hours and 52 minutes as it was in 2009—especially in the age of the DVR and the BlackBerry, which have acclimated us to instant gratification.
Then there’s the lack of big-time personalities. The NBA has Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, and Kevin Durant, just to name a few. Plenty of basketball fans hate Kobe and Lebron, but people still love to watch them play, even if it’s only to root against them. In baseball, the only two players bringing global exposure to the sport are Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. Many baseball players are famous in their own countries but not elsewhere. Ironically, baseball also loses fans because its athletes are generally well-behaved and stay out of trouble. Casual fans are drawn to dramatic off-field stories about athletes.
The lasting effect of the steroids era and the lack of powerful home run hitters is hurting baseball, too. It is no coincidence that one of the most popular seasons in baseball history was 1998, the same year Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased Roger Maris’s single-season home run record. America has a love affair with the long ball.
So how can baseball buck this recent slide and increase the popularity of the game?
There is no way to increase the number of home runs players hit, and it was efforts to do so that tainted the integrity of the game for the last 15 years. There is no surefire way to invent large personalities for players, either. You just can’t produce a Ron Artest.
The best and easiest way to increase popularity is to shorten game time. Many die-hards and purists will complain that you can’t rush the game. But why not? Games 50 years ago were two hours long, and those weren’t any less pure. Batters should be forced to stay in the batter’s box for the entire at-bat so they can’t step out after every pitch to adjust their batting gloves eight times and fix their jock strap. By saving just 10 seconds every pitch, games could become 25 minutes shorter. With a 162 games in a season, it becomes a little more manageable to follow a team and go to more games.
It is important that MLB’s commissioner Bud Selig attack this problem now before it gets out of hand. With the NBA, NFL, and even the NHL starting to cater to the new, 21st-century fan, Major League Baseball must make sure it doesn’t get left behind.
