Viewing Habits Suggests Soccer's Rise. Baseball's Decline.
- Thread starter Althetuna
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The extreme specialization of pitching is ridiculous. I know it's all data driven, but holy hell, it still annoys me when a starting pitcher considers 5 innings a quality start. Pitchers from 20 years would call that getting warmed up.
Honestly I wish I had a group of friends where we did that. That's sounds awesome.
I am a huge tennis fan. Picked up playing about 14 years ago and the game is so different then it used to be. It’s physical and mental to a high level. The trick with it is not get frustrated and be able to get past the basics of it. Once I started playing at a good to fairly above average level it easily became my favorite activity. You get an insane workout in if you reach 3.5 to 4.0 level. Anything above that and you will shed weight.
May I suggest the Minnesota Loons. **** ton of fun, and have been really good the last few years after an awful start to mls.
Yeah you pretty much nailed everything what's wrong with youth baseball and really youth sports to a certain degree. It's amazing how blind people are that people are profiting from the privatization side of youth baseball and IMO that's really gross. The other big issue I have with baseball is that people have bought in to the idea that baseball needs to be a year rounds commitment for a frickin 10 year old. It's literally a pony up or get off the bus arrangement. I get that kids learn certain skills at different ages but puberty is a hell of an equalizer.
It's phenomenal. Have you been to games there yet? I've been to 6 in the supporters section, always right behind goal. Never leave with a voice.
This x 1000. Baseball used to fun because different styles could win. Now everybody plays in little league stadiums and it works too well to sit there and take backwards Ks looking for a mistake pitch. As a result you also had great defensive plays. Now you might have a few legit players on a team, but usually a lineup has a few guys that are just B- designated hitters that they throw out in the field.
Baseball has so thoroughly screwed itself. Blackout rules, tiny stadiums that have led to this walk/k/hr approach that is a snooze fest, terrible marketing, and the refusal of baseball until now to start tweaking rules to have less downtime. It seems like baseball is either trying to tank, or at best is just appealing to its old base and trying to make some money as it dies.
As has been said in this thread and the youth sports thread, it’s become a sport of die hards only. But it makes sense. Like golf and hockey, it is so skill dependent, that training, practicing and doing sport-specific activities get results. It isn’t like football where a big or athletic kid can show up in 9th grade and quickly become a good player. If you never play baseball or have rarely played more than rev league, you are so far behind in HS that it’s damn near impossible to catch up. If your kid loves baseball and you are willing to shell out a couple grand a year, your kid is going to be a good baseball player almost for sure.
That’s an interesting point about the stadium size. Golf courses have lengthened and adapted via other intelligent designs to the longer play of today’s game. Baseball hasn’t done anything to adapt to the juiced balls and players.
Yes the extent that some of the USSSA teams go is idiotic. It was great when my sons team with volunteer dad coaches, 4-5 local tournaments under their belt, and a bunch of kids that play multiple sports beat the pants off the local baseball big $ program that plays tons of games.
Man, you nailed it. I first coached my daughter for 4 years (age 7-10) in a competitive rec softball league and was told early on by the older coaches that tournament ball was cannibalizing rec softball leagues. 2 years later softball was done at our complex, around 2012. The young girls had a choice after that of either diving full tilt into a tourney team or not playing. Many opted not to play and others had a miserable experience and quit after a year.
The same this is now happening for our sons in baseball. If Little League didn’t offer the aspiration of making it to Williamsport at age 12 it wouldn’t exist. It’s all USSSA tourney ball now, which has the expectation of near year round training and games on lots of weekends. It’s great for families that are really into it but it’s killing participation. The rec players were baseballs future fans.
It was worse than not adapting. They went all in on the home run when having a lineup of multiple power guys was a cool novelty.
I know I’m in the minority, but it’s sort of like football and how the rules are such that different styles can’t win. You have to have an elite QB or you really have no chance. I hate that throwing up a ball into coverage while a WR initiates contact is a really good strategy.
We have been to at least 4. The first we were in the SE corner right down by the pitch. That was the game in Allianz's inaugural season where the Loons scored to draw it even in about the 90th minute and then proceeded to win it in stoppage time. There was pic of Adrian celebrating the goal right in front of us that seemed to be used everywhere.
Haven't sat in the Wonderwall yet. We did sit in the supporter's section at US Bank a couple of times, though.
IMO this is why football is never going away. It's a game that isn't so skill dependent. Baseball, soccer, basketball, are just so skill driven that kids need to start the grind early. Football I'm not even sure how beneficial it is to start early because the body types are so different.
My in laws have a bunch of old HS football coaches. They said tackle before 7th is counterproductive. They even said they don’t care if a kid plays in JH. As long as the kid is in sports in JH they don’t think it matters. Member of ISU staff told me essentially the same thing a couple years ago when our kids were playing basketball together.
I've been to a few Iowa Cubs games the last few years and the pitch clock does help speed up the game. It seems it's more of a suggestion than a rule though.
I would rather watch a random Tuesday game between the Pirates and Marlins before I'll watch a soccer game.
Soccer is just too frustrating for me. It reminds me of basketball if the players dribbled and passed around the entire court and once every 5 or 6 minutes someone actually takes a shot.
I would rather watch a random Tuesday game between the Pirates and Marlins before I'll watch a soccer game.
Soccer is just too frustrating for me. It reminds me of basketball if the players dribbled and passed around the entire court and once every 5 or 6 minutes someone actually takes a shot.
Exactly - this is why football is still exciting despite the fact that it really is mostly downtime. Each play is distinct and you and the announcers build up to each play. There are so many moving parts and pieces that contribute to a successful play. So leading up to a big 3rd and long you can look at the positioning of the offense and defense, watch the pre-snap reads and adjustments made by each team, and then look at the replay afterward from 2-3 different camera angles to show what different players were doing to contribute.
Compare that to baseball - leading up to each pitch really all you can do is wonder if it will be a strike or ball. Maybe if you're a highly educated fan you can think about what pitch type will be thrown. In a few rare situations you can think about or wonder if the batter will try to bunt or hit a sac fly.
The big difference is that between football plays there is a lot to talk about and think about because there's a lot that could be done by either the offense or the defense. There isn't only one optimal strategy. In between pitches there's not much that can happen. The pitcher will throw a pitch, the batter will swing or not swing and hit or not hit. In rare cases a runner might try to steal. Other than the pitcher, catcher, and batter, the rest of the players are not doing anything interesting the vast majority of the time. Now imagine if the rules were different and the pitcher could toss the ball back to the second baseman and let the second baseman throw the pitch from his position, resulting in an automatic strikeout if it is a strike that would be an interesting game. You could talk about what the pitcher was going to do on any given play. Maybe the rules are changed so that the batter has some way to do something other than swing or not swing. Maybe if he can run halfway to first base before being tagged he gets to steal first? Baseball needs more variety and more possibilities for something unexpected to happen.
That's a very important point and distinction between football and baseball. While the downtime might be similar, football plays are pretty unique and widely varying. For the most part, seeing a ball, strike, double, homerun, etc. there's nothing to unique or exciting. Only great defensive plays are really exciting highlights in my opinion. And unfortunately as mentioned earlier, that has really been drastically reduced due to the emphasis on taking walks and hitting HRs.
In my opinion baseball HAS to be dramatically faster in pace of play if it has any hope of staying as a major sport in the US over the next few decades. It's not going to be good enough to say, see the games aren't really THAT much longer. They need to contract the games so they are shorter than they have been in decades in my opinion. Also, I think they should bite the bullet and reduce number of games by quite a bit. Raise the stakes of the games. Expand the playoffs to get more teams in contention.
I do think they need to figure out a way to get more action - more balls in play, more swings, more defensive plays. I have no idea how you might do that in a realistic way other than deadening the balls to make it much harder to hit HRs. A really wild idea might be to take a page out of the extra innings rule and start some innings with a guy on 1st. To make it even more exciting, allow the team to put any guy they want in that role. He wouldn't be in the lineup necessarily, it would be almost like a designated runner. Then you could have a base stealing specialist on the roster that has an impact.
