Baseball is great, but football is king

CHICAGO — In an attempt to be snarky on the final weekend of the NFL regular season, Major League Baseball sent out a wordless tweet that contained two emojis of a baseball and a football. Though I’m not fluent in emoji-speak, I believe the message was “baseball is greater than football.” The tweet has garnered more than 35,000 likes and 1,800 comments since it was posted Dec. 29, and sparking debate in an otherwise dull offseason obviously was MLB’s objective. For many, there’s really no debate at all. Baseball is the so-called national pastime and a beloved sport handed down from generation to generation. But whether it’s a better sport than football is in the eye of the beholder. Most fans I know love both sports, and since they only overlap in September and October there’s really no reason to choose one over the other outside of a few Sundays every fall. But the seemingly innocuous tweet may actually be a sign MLB is getting worried about its sinking status in the modern sports world. Overall MLB attendance was down 4 percent in 2018 at 69.6 million, the first time it has dropped under 70 million since 2003. And according to Sports Media Watch, 40 of the 50 most-watched sporting events in the U.S. in 2018 were NFL games, including the top seven on the list. The World Series is baseball’s showcase, and 2018 featured an intriguing matchup between two iconic franchises with national followings. But according to the Nielsen Company, the decisive Game 5 of the World Series between the Red Sox and Dodgers ranked only 38th on the list of prime-time TV telecasts in 2018 with 17.64 million viewers. Boston’s Series-clinching victory finished behind three NBA Finals games between the Warriors and Cavaliers, 14 Sunday Night Football games, one Thursday Night Football game, the NFL season opener and two college playoff games, not to mention four NFL postseason games, including Super Bowl LII, which naturally was tops with 103.39 million viewers. As the NFL playoffs begin this weekend, it’s apparent the MLB emojis are backward. MLB knows it has issues, which is why the league and the players union made a concerted effort last season to speed up the game with shorter breaks between innings and limited mound visits. At the GM meetings in November, MLB Deputy Commissioner Dan Halem noted average game time was down around 4½ minutes to about three hours, saying it was “going in the right direction.” Still, the attendance drop is glaring, thanks in part to weather-related issues early on (a record 28 postponements in April), the proliferation of rebuilding (some say “tanking”) teams and increasingly high ticket prices. Halem said owners are “heavily focused on making sure if people, particularly families, want to attend baseball games, that there are options to do so that are affordable.” So what happened? “Generally, there’s a lot of competition for people’s time,” Halem said. “Our local [regional sports network] ratings were good. People may be consuming baseball in different ways. But it’s an area that the commissioner is focused on.” An absence of action may be the biggest problem. There were more strikeouts (41,207) than hits (41,109) for the first time in MLB history, and the lack of balls in play leads to more dead time even when batters aren’t loitering outside the box adjusting their batting gloves. That isn’t expected to change any time soon, though Halem said there are mixed opinions on whether the game must change to create more action. Meanwhile, the NFL just completed its highest-scoring season in history and saw a 5 percent ratings increase from 2017. Some games last 3½-4 hours, and no one raises a stink. This postseason includes venerable franchises such as the Bears and Cowboys, new stars such as Patrick Mahomes and Jared Goff, and old standbys such as Tom Brady and J.J. Watt. Baseball will always be a great sport and the preferred choice of millions. There’s no place I’d rather be on a summer day than in a ballpark. But when it comes to star power and watchability, football is still the king.