Opening Day in baseball is Thursday afternoon and baseball fans are hoping this is the year for their favorite team. However, baseball does have some issues that do need to be addressed as it heads into a new season.
On The Colin Cowherd Podcast this week, Cowherd was joined by former NBC broadcaster and now at MLB Network, the legendary Bob Costas, to talk about the past and the current state of the game.
Cowherd began the podcast by talking about the 3 things he would change about the game, which would be to ban defensive shifts, lowering the mound, and shortening the season due to the lack of urgency.
One of the issues that Cowherd brought up that baseball has was whether or not it would be able to challenge the NFL in terms of its popularity in the media. While the baseball pool is talented with international players, it is complex, Cowherd argues, while football is domestic, simple, and linear. Costas didn’t think it was a factor, but brought up that football is only once a week and it has lost the pace of play that it used to have.
“Baseball’s advantage when it had the appropriate leisurely pace was it had no clock,” Costas said. “When the Yankees and Pirates played Game 7 in 1960, the score of the game was 10-9. It took 2 hours, 36 minutes for a 9-inning game. The Yankees played Cleveland in an early playoff game last year. That game took 5 hours, the same score for a 9-inning game. Nobody is saying you should go back 60 years, but there has to be a happy medium between those two things.”
As for the NBA, Costas says current media deals have affected the way some fans view LeBron James and other current superstars compared to players of the past.
“What basketball has done, essentially, the NBA is a cable sport. Even when you watch the games on ABC as good as Mike Breen is as a play-by-play man, you think this is the same thing you just watched on ESPN. It doesn’t feel as big (not Mike’s faul, he’s a terrific announcer).
“Because it is a cable sport, that’s part of the reason to the casual person LeBron may be equally excellent, but nowhere he is as remotely impactful in popular culture (compared to Michael Jordan). Little old ladies from Omaha wanted to watch Michael Jordan. The promos for the game were on ER, The Today Show. It was central to what was going on. Football maintains that centrality whereas hockey, baseball, and basketball on a national basis are essentially cable sports.”
While baseball is back and a new season begins, the interview with Cowherd and Costas is a reminder there are plenty of ways in which baseball is behind football and has a tall task in challenging the NFL in the era of social media.
