Alan Weiss’s Monday Morning Memo® – 6/18/18
Attendance is declining in major league baseball in the U.S. That’s not surprising to me. I’m from the era when it was expected that pitchers would pitch an entire game unless being battered, weak hitting shortstops didn’t make $20 million a year, and you played for the team, not yourself or the cameras.
There are great athletes in competition today: Nadal, Brady, James, the Williams Sisters, Rinaldo, et alia. They make a fortune not just from their play, but from their endorsements. I don’t begrudge them a thing—their careers are relatively brief, and injury is always a possibility. But we’re at an age of specialization where there are more coaches on a basketball bench than there are reserve players. Baseball managers use analytics to run the game (baseball is considering making shifting infielders illegal in order to increase hits, which are at a modern era low). In a three-hour football game, there are approximately 20 minutes of actual play action on the field. I’m tired of incessant replays in all sports.
The problem for me is that the games are no longer played for the fans, they’re played for the players. That’s like a theatrical event staged for the pleasure of the theater company and cast (and, unfortunately, I see too much of that here in Providence). You need an audience to pay the investors in a play, and you need fans to pay for all those highly paid athletes on the field.
I want excitement, not science in the ballpark. I want to see action, not strategy sessions or sibylline planning. I don’t mind the fights on the hockey ice, but I get quickly bored with the faked injuries on the soccer field.
It’s the fans who count, and we’re bored. There’s only one great sport I know of in the world which features great athleticism and constant action, and that’s Australian Rules. Why can’t they bring THAT to the U.S.? Why not, mate?
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Jeffrey Summers
“The problem for me is that the games are no longer played for the fans, they’re played for the players. ”
Same thinking in business when gurus talk about putting the employee first and the customer second?
Chris Law
Because an Australian Rules pitch is too big. They play on a cricket pitch, and when I saw a soccer game played on the pitch at the Melbourne Cricket Ground the soccer outline looked like a postage stamp in the middle of a sea of green. They could make a smaller game I guess to fit in the smaller stadia here, but that would fundamentally change the game, unfortunately. It is more action than you see here, I agree.
Two interesting things from my memories there:
1. I think it is 18 a side, and I once counted about 56 people on the field during actual play. They have runners who are not part of the play but they pass instructions from coaches. Water boys. Tons of referees, and some medics (play didn’t stop if it was on the other end of the field).
2. One of the weirdest cullinary experiences is to get a “Meat Pie” at the game. That’s what it says on the packet. In small print it says it “could contain the meat of one or more of the following animals…” with a list of about 15 different species. Very odd.