An Open Letter to the Commissioner of Major League Baseball

www.michaeladelberg.com

Because I watch ESPN’s Sports Center every so often, I am aware that the Major League Baseball Play-Offs have begun. Because I skim the newspaper sports pages, I am aware that the Yankees and Phillies won the eastern divisions again, the Red Sox fell like rocks, and the Washington Nationals (my home team) had a promising season. That’s nearly all I know about the 2011 Major League Baseball season. For the third straight year, I didn’t watch more than an inning or two of any game, and won’t watch more than a few innings this post-season.

If you’re losing people like me you should be very worried. I’m a sports fan who watches four or five hours of sports programming a week and double that during football season. I grew up a baseball fan: I played Little League for several years and have permanently memorized the batting order and starting pitching rotation for the ’86 Mets, the last baseball team I seriously followed. My boys have played six years of Little League between them, and one still participates. But they never watch baseball on TV. When given a choice this summer between a Nationals game or a movie, they picked the movie.

My family is not unusual. In the suburbs, parents are pushing their kids toward soccer rather than Little League. Soccer registration tops baseball in my ‘burb. It’s well documented that youth baseball is disappearing from the cities. Lacrosse is growing like gangbusters up and down the East Coast. ESPN’s baseball ratings have dropped 10% since 2009. It’ll dip more in coming years. (Stadium attendance, however, stays high because of baseball’s monopoly over the summer.)

There are different theories for what ails baseball--the lingering steroids scandal, competitive imbalance between big and small market teams, etc.--but the biggest problem is much simpler. Your product is boring. I heard one sports pundit wisecrack that baseball “packs fifteen minutes of action into a three hour telecast.” He nailed it—though fifteen minutes might be generous.

You have not improved your product in any substantial way for decades. With each year of inaction, your product grows more out of sync with an American sports public that craves speed and action. (Shame on us for our short attention spans and need for pyrotechnics, but that’s the reality of the modern viewer.)

A generation ago, the NFL reinvented football, turning a slow-moving, low-scoring, run-oriented product into a quicker, higher-scoring, pass-oriented product. When the NBA enjoyed its spectacular growth in the 80s, it was largely because the league made changes that promoted ‘run and gun’. Both sports ensure a quick pace to their games with time clocks. With these lessons in mind, here are a couple of easy things you should do:

• Stop pitchers from leaving the rubber and stop hitters from leaving the batter’s box. Put a 10-second time clock on the pitcher. If the pitcher fails to deliver the pitch (or throw to first), charge him with a ball; if the hitter isn’t in the box when the pitcher throws, tough luck on him.

• Stop managers/coaches/players from visiting the pitcher’s mound or arguing with umpires. Give each team three one-minute time-outs a game that can be used for mound visits or other purposes. Leaving the dug-out must result in a pitching change, time-out, or an automatic out if the team has used its time-outs.

I doubt these changes, which are pretty modest in scope, are all that’s needed. (Last year, SI rported that 28% of baseball at-bats now end in a strike out or walk vs. only 20% in the 70s. This means a lot more time watching the pitcher and catcher play catch, and a lot less time watching the ball in play.) But my suggestions are a start.

At this point, I may be a lost cause as a baseball fan. But you still have a shot at earning the loyalty of my boys. If you show the courage to adjust your product to modern tastes, I’ll be rooting for you. Heck, I’ll even watch a game or two.