It still breaks my heart to see how far baseball has fallenRead on for Shank almost crying into a beer, but baseball's waning popularity is largely self-inflicted. Most of the Red Sox - Yankees games, for example, clock in from 3 to 4 hours with pitching changes out the wazoo. Until that's rectified, fans will keep tuned into other sports.
Picked-up pieces while waiting for someone other than Tony Massarotti or Lou Merloni to mention the Red Sox on Boston sports radio . . .
▪ I am a realist. I don’t bay at the moon wishing folks under 50 still read printed newspapers. I know that our printed product is enjoyed primarily by people who remember Dwight Eisenhower, daily Mass, Suffolk Downs, and an age when everybody knew who was heavyweight champ of the world. For the most part, this is Major League Baseball’s audience in 2021.
But it still breaks my heart sometimes.
Last Sunday, after attending a memorial service for a family member, I drove my brother back toward home, listening to Joe Castiglione (another hardball geezer like myself) delivering play-by-play on the Red Sox very important Game 162 in Washington. It was in the middle innings and the Sox were trying to dig out of a 5-1 hole.
This part sticks out like a sore thumb:
The Sports Hub, Boston’s FM sports radio powerhouse, routinely mocks baseball and largely ignores the Sox, except for Massarotti’s short evening program during the season. 98.5 consistently dominates the ratings. It’s strictly business. The soul-crushing reality for us baseball guys is that a Boston sports station is not rewarded for talking baseball. So they don’t do it. It’s far better for business to talk endlessly about a 1-3 football team that hasn’t won a playoff game in three years. That’s the reality, people.Here's what we wrote over three years ago about 'largely ignoring the Red Sox':
And now that he's off the Zolak & Bertrand show, he'll continue to provide the same level of baseball discussion - none at all. That's what happens when a sports columninst would rather go on the air and regurgitate the previous day's newspaper column instead of giving the fans what he believes they should get.Shank appears for two hours on 98.5 The Sports Hub just about every week. If he feels there isn't enough baseball conversation, there's a way to address that problem - provide it when you do these appearances.
I agree with your point that baseball's wounds are mainly self-inflicted. The biggest problem from my viewpoint? Too many LONG commercial breaks.
ReplyDeleteDuring the regular season, commercial breaks are roughly two minutes between innings and for mid-inning pitching changes. For a full nine-inning game, if each team has two mid-inning pitching changes, that's 42 minutes of television commercial time.
I sat in the bleachers for Game 3 Sunday night, and postseason commercial breaks are roughly three minutes; given the same circumstances, that's 63 minutes of commercial time.