MLB’s relevance dying like a dinosaur

As a child, I was a baseball junkie. I used to watch at least 90-100 Atlanta Braves games a year.

But as I got older, something happened. The sport just sort-of slipped from its perch at the top of my summertime TV-watching priority list to the middle. From there, it sunk even further and it’s now sunken to the bottom. In the 2015 season, I watched roughly six innings of Braves baseball – if not less.

Sure, a lot of the apathy has to do with the fact that the Braves were awful this past season and had no chance to compete for postseason play.

But it’s deeper than that. Even if my beloved Braves were a competitor, I wouldn’t have paid attention to the season in close detail. I can’t really explain it – I’m just not interested.

And research and ratings show that no one else is interested, either. Numbers continue to show that baseball has long become a sports dinosaur – the game that was once a power, but is now stale, archaic and on the way to becoming extinct.

There are a lot of factors that have contributed to this downfall.

The biggest is societal shifts and the sport’s unwillingness to change.

When baseball was America’s Pastime, the pace of life was so much slower than it is today. Think about it. The sport was at its peak in the 1960s and 1970s. In some cities, the popularity peak was even before that. During those times, the world was different. We didn’t have Facebook, Twitter and the Internet to connect us all together. Without that connectivity, we lived far more patient and relaxed lives than we do today.

We didn’t have breaking news alerts to speed up our news cycle. We didn’t have automobiles that traveled 80 mph on the Interstate. We didn’t carry cell phones, and we still relied on snail mail to communicate with friends and family in other places.

Because of that different lifestyle, we didn’t mind the slow, lazy pace of baseball – a sport that relies heavily on strategy and that lacks a lot of offense now that steroids are out of the game.

But as life has sped up and Americans have gotten more hungry for offense and immediacy. And baseball has failed to change to meet the demands of those fans.

There is absolutely no reason that baseball should still have a 162-game season. That’s about 60 games too many. The slate of games is just too long. We’re an ADD society today. The more we have to consume, the faster we lose interest in the product.

Any season where the great teams still lose 65 games is a season that’s far too long. There’s no immediacy and no reason for fans to care about any one, particular game. If a team wins or loses a ballgame, it’s not a big deal. Even if they win or lose four or five in a row, it’s still not a big deal nor a reason to sweat or rejoice.

Playing every, single day is exhausting to fans. It takes so much time and effort. To watch 100 games from start-to-finish takes 300 hours (12.5 days) of time, assuming that the games average three hours a piece. If one makes the effort to watch all 162 games in a season, they will have dedicated more than 20 days to the sport. By comparison, one can watch a team’s entire NFL season in just 48 hours. College football is even shorter and an entire season can be consumed in 36-40 hours for diehard fans.

Ratings and attendance numbers show that late-season baseball draws in the most fans. The one-game playoff for the Wild Card posts even larger numbers. Why? Fans love immediacy and feeling like every game is important. Baseball needs to slash its schedule and make being a fan easy again.

While we’re at it, let’s shorten the games a little, too.

The average MLB game last two hours and 52 minutes. About two hours and 20 minutes of that time is downtime. You know, the time that we spend waiting for a pitch or the time that we spend watching a pitcher throw over to first base over and over and over again to stall while waiting for a guy in the bullpen to finish warming up.

Baseball needs to speed up its game in a bad way. A pitch clock needs to be instituted to keep the game moving along. If it can be done in college baseball, it can be done in the pros, as well.

From there, the MLB should make moves to limit the number of times that batters can leave the batter’s box in the middle of at-bats. While we’re at it, let’s also limit the number of times that pitchers can attempt a pick-off.

Let’s get all of the dead air out of the broadcast and get things moving again.

It’s not the 1950s anymore. The world is much faster today than it used to be.

Fans want constant action, urgency and pace.

I don’t watch baseball anymore because it has none of the above. And the ratings show that more and more Americans join my club each year.

Don’t be a dinosaur, baseball. Change and save yourself before it’s too late.