U.S.
fans dismiss World Baseball Classic, pastime
dismissed by fans
Kyle Cavaness
It takes an international worldwide
event like the World Baseball Classic to
really
smack America in its collective face – baseball,
our pastime, our middle child between representative
democracy and Disneyland, is all but dead
in the land of its birth.
The WBC has come and gone and within sports circles, it was a rousing
accomplishment.
Commissioner Bud Selig’s “sling” is due to come off in four
to six weeks, after wrenching his arm congratulating himself and Major
League Baseball for putting on such a successful venture. The yardstick for measuring
success in American baseball, however, has become much shorter as the sport has
aged.
Televising the WBC’s games in the United States, ESPN averaged just over
1 percent of the ratings market share throughout the series, which adds up to
about 1.4 million viewers per game. The network pulled down just under 2 million
viewers for the final, and topped out with 2.5 million for America’s final
game- a 2.3 percent market share– against Mexico in Round II.
If these numbers seem small, they are. The two episodes of Fox’s “American
Idol” that aired the same week as the WBC Finals averaged a 26 percent
market share, which totals up to over 19 million viewers each night.
None of the WBC games made even a bump in the Nielsen ratings in America, compared
to countries like South Korea, who received a 50 percent market share for their
semi-final game against Japan. Cuba reportedly had power outages due to the number
of viewers watching the final against Japan.
Any number of factors can be blamed for the discrepancy in ratings between
countries: promotion, the availability of alternative programming, and
so on. Still, none
of the above can fully explain the lack of interest other than the fact that
the vast majority of Americans simply don’t care about baseball anymore.
This reasoning extends to Major League Baseball as well. The World Series
in
1967 received a 57 percent market share, compared to 19 percent in 2006; the
All-Star Game pulled down a 50 percent market share in 1967 and 14 percent in
2005. According to the viewing audience, baseball has been on a downward slide
for four decades and is showing no signs of shaping up.
What is happening to American baseball? In the WBC’s case, at least, caution
prevailed for many of the Major Leaguers; many of those who didn’t play
said they were concerned about getting injured in a game during the time of year
usually reserved for spring training. Talking these players into risking their
multi-million dollar contracts in an uncertain and untried “classic” must
have been difficult for those Jerry Maguire called “paycheck players.”
Baseball, once a unifying pastime and symbol of America, can no longer
garner one-tenth the attention of a high-stakes karaoke competition,
even with something
as innovative and impressive as the World Baseball Classic. Apparently we have
moved on and left the rest of the world behind, abandoning the sport we created.
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