I'm ready for the baseball playoffs now.

MLB

Inter-league play is over. The All Star game has been played. Now, I have had enough baseball and am ready for the playoffs. Baseball has only another 3 weeks until football and the NFL steals the spot light and doesn’t give it back. Baseball has a following but it is losing ground against other sports particularly football.

Proof of how totally football overshadows baseball can been seen most clearly in the steady decline of the TV ratings for the World Series. It has fallen about 50% in the last 10 years while the ratings for the All Star game have held fairly steady. Why? Because no one plays football in the middle of July.

Baseball has to take maximum advantage of the period when it is the only major league sport in the docket. The schedulers seem dedicated to having all the games between the Boston and the Yankees in the first few weeks of the season. But that is when both the NBA and NHL has its playoffs. A good marketing guy would never put their best games and highest draws on opposite a tough competitor. They should have waited until the MLB was the only show on TV.

Baseball faces another problem as well. The playoffs and World Series have started so late that the kids couldn’t watch them to the end. Add that to the fact that kids don’t play baseball the way we used to growing up in the 1950s, and you have the makings for a of a marketing disaster in the future.

Baseball has been trying to increase interest among the young by moving the first pitch time of playoff games earlier. It has also begun broadcasting the armature draft on television. The MLB draft will never reach the level of interest of the NFL draft for a couple of reasons. A lot of the early draft picks are high school age which very few fans have seen. Since most people don’t watch NCAA baseball except the the college world series they don’t even know the college players. So because most people don’t know the players, the interest in the draft just isn’t going to come close to that of the NBA or NFL.

So let’s move baseball of the national sports stage and get ready for the real national pass time—football.

That’s what I think. Tell me what you think.

Bill Smith is a former coach of several semi-pro teams, has officiated both football and basketball, done color on radio for college football and basketball and has scouted talent. He is a senior writer for and edits https://fryingpansports.com. He has also published several novels on and edits .

Technorati Tags: MLB,draft,NFL draft,NBA draft,All Star Game,World series,College football,high school sports,college baseball
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2 thoughts on “I'm ready for the baseball playoffs now.”

  1. Bill-
    I couldn’t have said it any better. I was actually just talking to some friends about how this is the “dead days” of sports…When the clock hits double zero’s during the last game of the NBA finals, the sports world takes a serious vacation..I like baseball, its pretty cool, but nothing compared to college and pro football and basketball. Mostly because of all the reasons you already listed, but also because the betting format for baseball blows. I’m not a huge sports better, but I throw a couple bucks around when I’m in Vegas on football or basketball. I really think that if they made baseball a more “gambler friendly” bet, than it definitely wouldn’t hurt the games popularity…Anyways, just a couple more weeks till football!!!

    Crime Scene Cleanup

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  2. I’m traveling to Italy during the major league baseball playoffs. I’ll be in Rome, Florence, and Venice. Any chance there’s an American version of a sports bar in those cities?
    .-= Mononucleosis´s last blog ..We all love and take care of ourselves. =-.

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