New York Times State of Mind

Word spread around the blogosphere pretty quickly on Sunday - the New York Times had written an editorial saying baseball was becoming irrelevant.

I had visions of the editorial board of the Old Gray Lady of journalism sitting around the office talking about that particular issue. Then I found out that the "editorial" was actually an op-ed piece, meaning it was one person's opinion. In other words, it wasn't the entire newspaper staff that believes baseball has lost its luster. The person in question who does is Jonathan Mahler. You can read his article by clicking here. I'll wait.

The immediate reaction of most people to the headline, even before they read the story, was that this was typical New York City-think. The Yankees had a year to forget, with its longtime stars either leaving or thinking about it. The Mets continued their rebuilding plan for another year, meaning they weren't very good.

I'm not sure how to judge if baseball has fallen out of the national conversation, as Mahler claims. Attendance seems to be quite good, competitive balance is at record levels. Great talents are arriving in droves, including Matt Harvey of the Mets to go along with names like Machado and Trout.

It's tough to argue that television ratings for the World Series, etc., are what they used to be, because they aren't. Yes, I know in a 300-channel universe (for those silly enough to pay for all those channels), there are more ways than ever to divide the audience. So everyone's numbers are worse than they used to be.

Here's what you need to know about that: The ratings for Breaking Bad's finale Sunday smashed records - 10.3 million viewers. The buzz about that show was terrific. Care to guess how many people saw me on "Jeopardy" in 1998? About 15 million.

I do have a theory, though, on what has happened to television ratings for the big events in baseball, basketball and hockey.

We're in an era where virtually every team in those sports has a connection to a television outlet. Here, the Sabres' games are carried on MSG. The Yankees and Nets are on the YES Network, although I'm still trying to figure out how one channel becomes a network. You can watch virtually every game of your favorite team these days.

Contrast that to the "good old days." In New York City, a good chunk of the games of the Yankees and Mets were on home TV, but that was relatively rare. In places outside the major metro areas - and remember we only had 16 teams in 14 cities in 1960 - the Saturday game of the week was pretty much. That made the World Series a major event because you could actually watch a game - well, you could if you were home during the day before night games arrived in the Series in 1971. And if you didn't want to watch those games, well, there were only a couple of other choices on the dial.

Hockey used to be even more restricted in its broadcasting. After 1967, you could get a game of the week on CBS and NBC if you didn't live near a team, and that was it - provided your local station carried it. Many in the South didn't. That even included the playoffs. It's different now. Most people have a rooting interest in a team, and after seeing three games a week for 26 weeks more or less, they may not be in too much of a hurry to see teams they don't care about if the Sabres aren't in the postseason.

Mahler argues that baseball was slow to adapt to changing times coming out of the Fifties, and lost its place to the NFL as the nation's top spectator sport. No argument here. Football also is a great sport for television, and a great sport for gambling, and those two factors have grown hand-in-hand. It's also a once-a-week commitment, event programming that makes a huge difference in interest for a particular game.

One other point here - Mahler has this to say after pointing out that college football and basketball been fed increased interest in their professional counterparts: "Why has college baseball failed to attract any meaningful interest? Mostly because there are already so many professional baseball games to watch."

You mean there aren't many college football and basketball games on television? In football, there's a game on virtually every night of the week, and a couple of dozen on Saturday. When January arrives, it's tough to avoid college basketball. Baseball is a different animal, with some top high school players siphoned off into the minor leagues. and without the tradition the other college sports have. It's apples and oranges.

And for the argument that the baseball draft has much more interest than football and basketball - let those two sports draft 18-year-olds out of high school, and see how much of an event it is.

Baseball isn't in the same spot as it had many years ago, but that's all right. It's still doing quite well by most metrics. You don't have to be a guest columnist for the Times to know that.

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Triple trouble

Just when you've seen it all at a baseball game, a play comes along like this:



Nashville went on to win the game.

Scenes from two ballparks

1. Last Tuesday night, I was off to Tropicana Field to see the Rays play the Angels in exciting American League action. You have to like a park in which parking is free when you have four people in the car; it's $15 for the rest of us. Plus, tickets at the second level between home and first were $31 apiece -- pretty good for major league baseball. There was help everywhere in the ballpark, and everyone was polite and friendly. And the staff handed out free programs as you walked in.

The highlight, though, came after a well-played game. You've heard of the promotion where kids run the bases after the game? Tampa Bay has something called "the senior stroll." You can walk from the area down the line from the dugouts out into center field, and then turn for the fence and exit in dead center.

So ... how cool is it to stand in an actual major league center field? Very. What's striking the view. The dome in Tampa has most of the seats between the foul poles, and they seem to go up forever. You feel surrounded, even in center field. And it must take some practice to pick up the ball off the bat on fly balls because of the background. Oh, yeah, those guys are pretty good. Next time, I bring a camera, darn it.

2. We had our own small section, more or less, in the club level at the Bisons' game today. We walked up 10 minutes before the game and bought seats in row A, seats 1 and 2. There were a few others scattered about in section 208. I found myself wondering about a foul ball, since that's pretty prime territory for such events.

Sure enough, a fall came back and bounced off a seat a row behind me and a few seats over. It bounced two rows in front of me, so I slid down and calmly picked up the ball.

Then, since I had thought about what I was going to do in such a case, I strolled over about 12 seats and handed the ball directly to a 5-year-old girl. Got a nice hand from the few that could see me up there, and the girl came over shyly to my seat at the end of inning to thank me.

You take your triumphs where you find them.

Summer's over

There is something sad about the end of your favorite baseball team's season.

Spring training marks the annual renewal of life, summer features warm days and good times, and fall seems compressed as we try to get everything done before the first snow, at least in the Northeast.

So it goes for the Red Sox fans, whose season ended Sunday night with a loss in Game Seven to the Tampa Bay Rays, those 1969 Mets impersonators. Fittingly, the high temperature Tuesday in Buffalo is scheduled to be in the low 40's, which isn't exactly baseball weather. Ever hit a baseball in cold weather? It's like a swarm of bees attacking your hands; it left me close to tears once, and it was warmer than that.

Boston's season raises an interesting question. In an age when you only hear chants of "we're number one," can you have a satisfying sports season when your team doesn't win it all? I'd like to think so, but it's tough ... and that's particularly true after a couple of instances of ultimate success, like the Red Sox have had lately.

It wasn't a great year in Red Sox Nation, but it was a pretty good one. The team's young talent continued to develop, ensuring a good future. Dustin Pedroia, Kevin Youkilis and Jon Lester look like stars. Boston made the playoffs despite a sideshow involving Manny Ramirez, who might have been useful in a Game Seven but the team probably wouldn't have gotten there with the distraction he represents. The Red Sox gave it all they had, beating a good Angels team and avoiding elimination for as long as possible in spite of a lineup that looked spent at time because of injuries. Mike Lowell would have been helpful in the playoffs, while Josh Beckett and David Ortiz were obviously hurting.

But the offseason brings time for contemplation, and it's easy to wonder about how some old friends will fare. Tim Wakefield, Jason Varitek and Mike Timlin were all big parts of the 2004 team, and all are facing serious questions about their baseball futures. If they all depart for one reason or another (not to say that they will, but they might), that would leave Ortiz as the only full-time player left from the magical 2004 season. Time waits for no one, particularly in baseball.

The offseason is also a time for action, as the team tries to readjust and get better for 2009. Trades? Free agents? Who knows? We only know that the Red Sox have resources and are willing to use them creatively. It's easy to feel much better about next year's baseball in Boston than in, say, Pittsburgh.

In the meantime, the New York Yankees haven't played baseball in three weeks. This was better.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

If you thought the musical in a food court was elaborate, check this piece of video out. The folks at Improv Everywhere moved in to a Little League game and treated it like a big-league contest ... complete with fans, programs, television broadcast and Jumbotron, not to mention a surprise guest from above.



Thanks to Deadspin for pointing this out. The Improve site has other details and some pictures.

Take Five, Steroids Edition

Five reasons to wonder about Congress, and not about a pitcher and his personal trainer:

1. After watching the Roger Clemens Congressional hearing the other day, on and off, for almost five hours, the same question struck me as everyone else: Why was Congress bothering with this one? Shouldn't this have been in a courtroom somewhere?
There may be better things for our nation's legislature to do that worry about how an ex-pitcher reacts to a shot.

2. And who knew that the status of Clemens' drug use was a partisan issue? The Republicans grilled Brian McNamee, the Democrats grilled Clemens. Guess the Republicans were the ones who got autographed baseballs from the Rocket the week before.

3. If Barry Bonds and his fans were watching the Congressional hearing, they might now be convinced that the steroid "witch hunts" (or, more accurately, attempts to find out the truth) can be conducted without regard to race, creed, color or national origin. Then again, if the fans weren't convinced after reading "Game of Shadows," they probably won't be now either.

4. Representative Dan Burton seemed shocked, "SHOCKED!" (thank you, "Casablanca"), that a personal trainer might lie to the media about his employer's steroid use. Somehow, he apparently didn't figure out that a guy who breaks the law to obtain illegal substances might feel that he has less than a moral obligation to tell the truth to Newsday.

5. Someone may have asked why the two sides came up with opposite conclusions about Clemens' steroid use, but I didn't see it. Were there conversations between the two men before the shots were taken? Did Clemens say something like, "Give me something to make me feel better, but don't tell me what it is, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean, know what I mean"? Did Clemens ever ask what he was taking, and where the substance came from? Did the steroid culture in major league baseball at the time ever come up in conversation between them?

It's still impossible to come up with a definitive answer to what really happened here between Clemens and McNamee, but McNamee seems to have pulled ahead a bit thanks to the testimony of Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch. It will be interesting to see if the issue is pursued in the future, and who pursues it.

Which way to Cooperstown?

There are three issues I try not to bring up in polite company because of the potential for arguments: politics, religion, and the Baseball Hall of Fame.

January 8 is announcement day for this year's class, and it could be an interesting one. There are no great new candidates for induction, such as Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken last year. So that means, at least in theory, that the old candidates may be able to move up. The rules are pretty familiar: a candidate needs 75 percent to be elected, and a voter gets to pick up to 10 players.

People are starting to realize that Rich Gossage was overwhelming as a relief pitcher in his prime. There's no one you'd rather see on the mound with a one-run lead in the ninth inning in the late 1970's. He threw a bunch of innings ... and threw them hard. It looks like it his time.

Will anyone join Gossage? That's where the fun beings, mostly about the candidacy of Jim Rice.

There's no doubt that Rice was a feared power hitter from 1975 to 1986 or so. There's also no doubt that his career ran out of gas before he could pile up any memorable career statistics. He only had 382 career homers. So he's not a clear winner.

That's the problem. Does he get credit for those 10+ great years? Is that enough? Is longevity important enough to overlook some, but not a lot, years of brilliance? Is Rice another Ralph Kiner, another great hitter who retired early before piling up career stats?

I'm a Red Sox fan, and I never thought Rice had the numbers to get in. Part of that may be the way he finished. His skills disappeared in a hurry, and I have a lasting memory of Rice rounding third against the Mets in the 1986 Series and lumbering home.

If you don't like the "dominating hitter for a while" theory of putting Rice in, there's the "least common denominator" theory. It goes something like this. Tony Perez wasn't as good a player as Jim Rice, and Perez is in the Hall, so Rice should be in the Hall. We'll forget for the moment that Perez was never a clearcut choice to go to Cooperstown, and many still believe he doesn't deserve the honor. Heck, people will be compared to Bill Mazeroski for years.

The basic problem, of course, is that there's no clear line for in/out. So a few hundred writers have to guess. Tomorrow, they'll guess on Rice.

This leads to all sorts of other discussions. Bert Blyleven is the opposite of Rice, having pitched for a long, long time and piled up some impressive career numbers. But he didn't have many great single seasons (he won 20 games once), and I never really thought of him as a Hall of Famer. Tim Raines was a mighty good player for an Expos team that played in the relative dark of Montreal, but suffered a bit when he left Canada for the second half of his career.

Then there are players like Andre Dawson, Jack Morris and Alan Trammell. All fine players, but as Bill Parcells said, it's the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Pretty Good. And for Mark McGwire, well, I'm not prepared to get into that discussion.

I don't think Gossage will have company in this year's voting, but I'll be watching closely. Just don't aske me about it -- an argument could follow.