The Winter that Saved Baseball

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find myself feeling that sports should produce justifiable results. For example, when the Saints won the Super Bowl back in February, the only explanation I could think of for the occurrence was that it was total destiny. The Indianapolis Colts proved nothing less than Super Bowl championship qualities and New Orleans made its way to Miami thanks to a plethora of Minnesota turnovers and a long-awaited Bret Favre implosion in the NFC championship game. Before Super Bowl XLIV, the Colts were seemingly the better team in nearly every facet. After the game, I felt much differently.

However, when you obtain a mindset such as my own, teams like the 2008-09 Arizona Cardinals and the 2007 Colorado Rockies aren’t expected to win when they reach the game of their sports’ highest glory. Sports aren’t supposed to be about which teams get hot at the right time; it’s about which teams portray championship-quality aspects and ultimately find a way to parlay those aspects into a complete championship team.
When it comes to teams such as the abovementioned, some manage to reach a previously unfathomable peak, essentially ruining the joy of following teams during the regular season. Which is exactly what transpired this past season in Major League Baseball.

On August 25, 2010, the eventual World Series champions were 6.5 games back in the NL West. They were in Wild Card contention, but the San Francisco Giants were more of an afterthought with the inevitability of a Philadelphia Phillies season-ending surge. That did in fact happen, but so did a collapse in San Diego, as the Padres lost 10 straight and could feel the Giants and Rockies nipping at their heels. Thanks to that dreadful swoon, the Giants maintained the pitching, defense, and overall record to stay in contention and ultimately claim the NL West title by a 2-game margin.

We all know what happened thereafter. The Giants won a magical World Series with an imposingly dominant pitching staff and a crew of misfits knocking in the necessary runs. It wasn’t pretty baseball, and it sure wasn’t star-studded, but it was enchanting, compelling, and mind-boggling all at the same time. But for a fan of my ilk, it was hard not to feel some feelings of exasperation.

The Giants had been in virtually zero playoff conversation until September. The best teams had been playing up to par all season, performing at a high level and showing signs of what we would eventually see come playoff time. In a nutshell, I felt like I wasted a significant portion of my life following teams that I felt would make an impact in the playoffs, and found myself regretting the time I put into analyzing teams such as the Rays, Rangers and Phillies because of the World Series potential I witnessed.

I’ve now come to grips with the fact that, in baseball, it’s all about getting hot at the right time. It’s the essence of the game. It’s a game of streaks, and when a team starts its hot streak in late October, that team is going to have a legitimate shot at winning the World Series. The season is a marathon, and if you have the stamina and short-distance speed to win the final sprint, all you have to do is still be in the race. However, when looking at baseball from a greater context, is this good for an already struggling sport?

Recent history has shown that regular season baseball isn’t as meaningful in comparison to other sports. This isn’t only true from the perspective of the die-hard fan, but the casual fan as well. What’s the point of following a sport during the regular season when it essentially means nothing?

Ticket sales and television ratings for the 2010 season reflected this conundrum most evidently. Two of the league’s most prestigious teams, the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers, experienced a 35% and 17% drop in TV ratings by July of last season, respectively. Major League Baseball’s attendance fell 6.6% in 2009 and teams began to show frustration due to the lack of attendance in 2010. Last season was probably the Tampa Bay Rays’ final shot at reaching a World Series with the players they attained at the time, yet the club spent a lot of time reaching out to fans or showing their disgust for the half-empty stadiums that were supporting one of the best teams in baseball.

Moreover, this season’s All-Star game produced the lowest-ever television rating in the event’s history with a 7.5 rating. The Red Sox lost its local RSN ratings lead for the first time in six years, as it plummeted from first to fifth. As one of the teams baseball thrives off, the Red Sox became a virtual nonentity last season and proved to be one of the hinges of baseball’s success, as well as its demise.

Some of it was the team itself; the rest was the fact that regular season baseball is becoming irrelevant. While regular season attendance and All-Star game ratings fell, playoff ratings jumped.

The 2010 League Championship Series became the highest rated of any LCS since the broadcasts were split between FOX and TBS four years ago. Furthermore, the fourth game of the ALCS was watched by 9.9 million viewers, which made the game the second-most watched postseason baseball game in cable TV history.

Conversely, World Series ratings reached a record low with an 8.4 rating.

There are a multitude of possible reasons for this. The first is the fact that neither the Yankees nor Red Sox were in the Fall Classic. Another is the fact that baseball’s viewership has been steadily declining since the conclusion of the Steroid Era and the downturn of the economy.

However, the underlying explanation may have the most impact. Maybe the casual fan felt some sort of emptiness in the culmination of the 2010 baseball season as well. Maybe those fans realized once again that baseball is nowhere near the perfect world. The Giants’ dazzling postseason run was nothing short of greatness, and undoubtedly captivated every suffering fan in the city of San Francisco, but it may have done more harm to baseball than good.

Which is why the current offseason has been a godsend to the game. The arrivals of Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez to the Red Sox have bolstered the Boston lineup and will imminently reinvigorate the Yanks/Sox rivalry within the playoffs. The addition of Cliff Lee to the Phillies has constructed the perennial pitching staff of the era and possibly the most daunting in history.
With four aces in the National League (Lee, Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, and Cole Hamels in Philadelphia) and slew of slugging lefties in the American League (Crawford, Gonzalez, and David Ortiz in Boston), two of baseball’s most renowned franchises will be chasing pennants from the opening pitch. Maybe these acquisitions to two of the most storied baseball towns in America will revitalize the league, or maybe they won’t. Regardless, it makes the upcoming season much more intriguing, and the top-heavy pennant races that baseball has always flourished under will be in full force and as beguiling as ever.

I don’t know about you, but baseball’s regular season will be much more relevant to me in 2011.