The Business of Emotion/Baseball

[AnPheitseog]

I've shifted to Japan and NPB. It reminds me of how baseball used to be for me as a kid and I love it AND then you add on the fun of a soccer crowd to it.

 

Pitchers batting, interleague only a month or so in the season. It's wonderful.

[YELDARBfield]

1 hour ago, AnPheitseog said:

I've shifted to Japan and NPB. It reminds me of how baseball used to be for me as a kid and I love it AND then you add on the fun of a soccer crowd to it.

 

Pitchers batting, interleague only a month or so in the season. It's wonderful.

Assuming you are in the States, how are you watching NPB games?

[Kramerica Industries]

2 hours ago, RyanMcD29 said:

I think the new rule changes have been a big win, as I've watched more non-Mets postseason baseball in a long while with how the pace of the game's been. But the playoff system, as much as everyone wants to argue otherwise, is a bit too borked. People who go all "But you guys all like March Madness with the random upsets, right?!" have failed to realize the big diminishing returns the NCAA Tournament has had from the Sweet 16 onward in recent years and that's showing up now with this new MLB format. And the NFL, NBA, and NHL all have more teams, but things tend to work out in the end with the champs usually being towards the top anyway. The Wild Card round's clearly giving an advantage to the teams that win it, and it hasn't exactly given us too much drama with 7 out of the 8 series being 2 game sweeps. I think if you recalibrate that back to one game playoffs, things even out a bit while still providing two extra markets the excitement of postseason ball.

 

The bigger concern, though, is probably the TV partner end. ESPN floating around that 2025 opt-out isn't a good sign, and nor has this past month where ESPN has hyped up NHL Opening Night and the 16 game night about 8 times more than they had their own exclusive window of the Wild Card round. It screams NHL on ESPN circa 2003 and buddy, that isn't going to end well. Combine that with Fox's comments this week on how baseball's... there while lauding the NFL/BiG nOOn SaTurDaY/NASCAR side of things and the RSN bubble bursting and, boy, that could get real ugly across the board in a few years. The RSN mess is already set in stone, but if you get ESPN opting out and Fox pulling a USGA contract on MLB that's gonna be a tough sell to find a taker for those national packages.

 

I'd be curious to know the source of the Fox comments you speak of, but either way ESPN's gradual decrease in baseball coverage is the bigger issue anyway for the sport. When they basically would give zero on-air promotion to the wild card round games that they had on their networks - a round of the playoffs that only exists really because they wanted to shoehorn their way back into having some form of playoff baseball on their networks. And then they get it and do absolutely nothing to promote it. There's part of me that can understand why highlights shows like Baseball Tonight don't exist anymore, but at the same time there are at least two big problems that have been created by that. 1) While you can watch your own team's highlights on demand on YouTube at almost any given time (as opposed to having to wait for them to come up on a television show), odds are people aren't going out of their way to watch the highlights of other teams games as well, whereas this was something you would do pretty much out of necessity when watching SC or Baseball Tonight (or any other sport's highlights show) in the past. This allowed you to get exposure, directly or indirectly, with the rest of the league, know the marquee players, be familiar with their performances, and all that stuff. As for the other thing, 2) is that these shows don't exist anymore but look at what's replaced them...First Take and a bunch of other hot take debate shows. I mean, besides the fact that most of us aren't at home and/or watching TV during the times of the day these shows are on...if you can argue that highlights shows have been made redundant by the on-demand availability of highlights for us offered by YouTube and other places today, I feel like I can just as easily argue that sports talk debate shows have the same kind of redundancy. There are plenty of podcasts and such out there that can offer more unique and detailed views into whatever team or sport you want to listen to than the extremely general nature of NFL and NBA talk on whatever sports talk shows still exist today...although I say that fully aware that the show Skip Bayless does these days might very well be a very poor imitation of a Dallas Cowboys podcast half the time. 

 

The coverage of the MLB playoffs has already shifted years ago to the point now where almost every game except World Series games end up on cable instead of over-the-air. I remember in 2017 when Game 7(!) of the ALCS was on FS1 while the college football game on Fox was a Kansas-TCU game. That really happened. And that ALCS involved the Yankees! This is a battle MLB should've fought harder years ago and didn't; the television contract where Fox began shifting LCS games onto FS1 began in 2014, the first full baseball season where FS1 existed. They willingly signed up for that. They've helped dig their own grave. I can't really feel too sorry for the state they find themselves in today. Speaking now for myself, I still like baseball as a sport, I've actually found a bit of renewed energy from going on /r/nyyankees and ridiculing the Yankees for the clown show organization they've become in recent years - I have no interest in discussing that here, you guys have no interest in reading it, and I'm pretty sure it's been years since I talked about the Yankees on this website - but my overall interest has dipped a lot in recent years, pretty much since the illegitimate COVID season and all the stupid on-the-fly rules changes they used (especially the ghost runner rule which has stuck around and is now permanently part of the game; that thing is worse than hockey shootouts and I've made no secret how much I hate hockey shootouts), and I'm also probably now to the point where I'm not sure I'll ever recover the level of interest I used to have. I'm different now than when I was 16 years old, it's just the way things go.

[RyanMcD29]

7 hours ago, Kramerica Industries said:

 

I'd be curious to know the source of the Fox comments you speak of, but either way ESPN's gradual decrease in baseball coverage is the bigger issue anyway for the sport.

Sure, came from an earnings call from Lachlan Murdoch this week. Not as damning as ESPN's no-sell, but still not great

[The_Admiral]

8 hours ago, Kramerica Industries said:

The coverage of the MLB playoffs has already shifted years ago to the point now where almost every game except World Series games end up on cable instead of over-the-air. I remember in 2017 when Game 7(!) of the ALCS was on FS1 while the college football game on Fox was a Kansas-TCU game. That really happened. And that ALCS involved the Yankees! This is a battle MLB should've fought harder years ago and didn't; the television contract where Fox began shifting LCS games onto FS1 began in 2014, the first full baseball season where FS1 existed. They willingly signed up for that. They've helped dig their own grave. I can't really feel too sorry for the state they find themselves in today. Speaking now for myself, I still like baseball as a sport, I've actually found a bit of renewed energy from going on /r/nyyankees and ridiculing the Yankees for the clown show organization they've become in recent years - I have no interest in discussing that here, you guys have no interest in reading it, and I'm pretty sure it's been years since I talked about the Yankees on this website - but my overall interest has dipped a lot in recent years, pretty much since the illegitimate COVID season and all the stupid on-the-fly rules changes they used (especially the ghost runner rule which has stuck around and is now permanently part of the game; that thing is worse than hockey shootouts and I've made no secret how much I hate hockey shootouts), and I'm also probably now to the point where I'm not sure I'll ever recover the level of interest I used to have. I'm different now than when I was 16 years old, it's just the way things go.

 

It speaks to my own disengagement that I forgot what a farce it was to move postseason games to FS1. The fact that we were being made to unearth the channel that used to be Speedvision in order to watch the Chicago Cubs win the pennant was ridiculous. We tolerated mid-series Stanley Cup Final games on the channel that used to be the Outdoor Life Network because, well, the NHL, but an LCS, especially one between Los Angeles and Chicago, should have been be free-to-air. It was embarrassing for baseball, or should have been, and yes, they did dig their own grave. Turner's coverage has the same problem as Fox with baseball and ESPN with NBA games: it's just more content they have, not what they put their heart and soul into (in order: basketball, football, and arguing over being unfair to LeBron). 

 

People will say "well, you'll never love the game as much as you did as a kid." That is not true! Anyone who has or knows a Cubs Fan Lesbian Aunt, a very specific type of person that definitely exists, knows this need not be true! 

[Sodboy13]

Hell, I love baseball as much, if not more, than when I was a kid, and I've only owned one Tori Amos album.

[infrared41]

On 11/4/2023 at 4:23 PM, Sodboy13 said:

Hell, I love baseball as much, if not more, than when I was a kid, and I've only owned one Tori Amos album.

 

I wish I still loved baseball as much as I did when I was a kid. It was probably the move from playing actual baseball to games essentially being a spreadsheet come to life that put out the fire in me. "Cornflake Girl" is a great tune, but the rest of her stuff isn't really my cup of tea.

[The_Admiral]

I wish we had known how corrosive to the beauty of baseball Fire Joe Morgan would ultimately be. Maybe we could have prevented Parks & Recreation, too.

[Alex Houston]

On 11/2/2023 at 7:47 PM, the admiral said:

My mom used to do traffic & continuity. I am fully in my element listening to talk about clocks and avails, bump sheets and affidavits. A computer in the guest bedroom that had DOS without Windows and only ran CBSI. Those were the days. Anyway, I hope next year Fox can sell some inventory before they have to resort to spots about why your business should buy spots.

 

Your mom probably knew the guy behind the Max Headroom incident, didn't she? Was she the one with the fly swatter? Don't lie know Admiral. 

[GDAWG]