What is this “World” of which this is a Series?

I love how people are responding to this interesting piece about the changing nature of newspaper coverage by taking the opportunity to sniff at baseball, and then wildly extrapolating their own lack of interest in it to mean that baseball is dooooomed. Snappy analysis, commenters!

“I mean, outside of a few markets (Chicago and Boston come to mind), are there even that many people that care about baseball anymore?”

Well, considering baseball sets attendance and revenue records almost every year, I’m going to say yes. There’s a little city called New York you may have heard of. About 7 million people went to major league baseball games there this year. That’s about 43,000 a night, every night from April to October. Yeah, it’s just dying on the vine, baseball.

“Way too many games, way too long of an attention span for younger viewers, and a system that has pretty much 80% of the teams out of the championship race by June.”

There’s been 162 games since 1961, eight more than there was for the half century before that. They added a layer of playoffs in 1969 and another in 1995, adding a max of 12 games to any one team’s schedule, and then it’s only two teams that can play that many. I missed the link to your figures on attention span, kids and baseball.

And the 80 percent figure for teams out of contention is true, except for the fact that it’s false. Considering that 27 percent of the teams make the playoffs, it’s kind of absurd to say 80 percent of them are out of it by June. As of Aug. 1 this season, just to pick a random date and year, I would say 18 of the 30 teams could reasonably say they were in contention for the playoffs. That’s 40 percent out of the championship race, by August, not June. In contention for the playoffs is in contention for the championship. The playoffs are a crapshoot. The best team involved doesn’t have much better odds to win than the worst.

On the subject of the piece: The thinking at newspapers has traditionally been that if you don’t send a reporter to the World Series, the Super Bowl, the heavyweight title fight and so on, you are bush league. It’s a sign of failure, of small-timeness. Advertisers notice it. Competitors, back when there were multiple papers in a town, would harp on it. It would endanger your ability to be taken seriously when you applied for a credential next time around. It was not a stupid thing to do. You have to keep in mind the tremendous margins newspapers operated with until very recently. I worked at newspapers in the late ’80s through mid-’90s, I subscribed to this theory, and while I think it no longer applies, I don’t think it was wrong then.

Newspapers have been a little slow to adjust to the new reality here, as they’ve been in other areas, of course. But it’s not simply a matter of their being stupid. It’s not a straight, simple, dollars-cents analysis — it costs more than it makes back to send a reporter, so we shouldn’t send one. There are benefits to sending a reporter to a big event even if it costs a paper money, and even if the reporter comes back with the same story as 59 other reporters, which you’d hope he wouldn’t. In the scheme of things, newspapers being a few years behind the curve on this particular question isn’t even in the top 100 stupid things they’ve done as an industry in the last 15 years.