Dan Bickley of AZCENTRAL Sports has a column touting Diamondbacks President Derrick Hall as the next baseball commissioner. Why? Because baseball is dying, you guys:
The sport no longer needs tradition, once the primary selling point. It needs reinvention and imagination. The proof can be seen at the All-Star Game, where the average viewer in 2013 was 53 years old . . .
Demographics are a legit concern, actually. It’s better to have a lot of butts in the seats than fewer butts in the seats, but the age of the butts is important for the future. It may be overstated a bit in baseball’s case in that baseball is quite famously a game people abandon in their teens and 20s only to come back to when they’re older, but MLB can’t always count on that. So, no, when someone goes after the demographic I’m not necessarily going to break out the BaseballIsDying-o-Copter to combat it.
Of course, there is some less relevant hand-wringing here:
Meanwhile, the Home Run Derby has become laborious and irrelevant, with players taking pitch after pitch after pitch. It’s the same type of inactivity that defines and dooms the sport. It also shows just how out of touch baseball can be, such as when an excoriated drug cheat (Nelson Cruz) makes the All-Star Game by popular vote.
How can baseball be out of touch — the implication being that it’s out of touch with its fans — when it is the fans who voted Cruz in? Indeed, preventing Cruz from playing despite the fans wanting him in the game would, by definition, make baseball out of touch. But don’t worry. He has a solution:
But then MLB has to get aggressive. It needs to think about seven-inning games and lowering the pitcher’s mound. It has to find a way to increase the action, hacking away at the fatty blocks of inactivity clogging most every game.
Thus is the nature of most baseball-is-dyingism: overstating problems and leaping to radical solutions which evince an ignorance of baseball and the context in which it is played. Anyone who thinks that, say, lopping off innings and thus fundamentally altering the game is a way to deal with slogging game times before, say suggesting that rules regarding times between pitches be enforced or more minor rule tweaks like rules against stepping out of the box or even changes to the way pitching changes are made probably doesn’t know about or care about such rules. They’re assessing baseball from the outside with the eye of a hired gun consultant who doesn’t care about what happened before or what happens after. All they want is to be able to say “problem solved” and move on to something else.
You never see people who know or care about the game say stuff like this. It’s just the tourists.
