One day, I walked into the town hall and mayor Jim met me at the door. He was excited and said he wanted to show me something. We walked down the hall to the janitor’s closet and Jim opened the door. He reached in and pulled out a mop with a huge head and all kinds of attachments. I remember thinking it was a space age version of a mop. Jim held the mop up triumphantly and said “even Ralph can keep the floors clean with this mop!”
I looked at Jim and said “Jim, you’re working on the wrong end of the mop. The problem isn’t with the mop, it’s with the person operating it.”
Now, you’re probably thinking, what’s that got to do with baseball, since this column is called Baseball World. Baseball is applying the same type of reasoning to their problem with declining attendance that Jim applied to the problem of dirty floors in the town hall.
Recognizing that their attendance is decreasing, baseball has spent a great deal of time analyzing their audience and has come to the conclusion that the game is not attracting younger people. After much study, they have decided that the game is too slow and takes too long for this part of their target audience. They have concluded that this segment of the population does not have or is not willing to take the time to sit through a long baseball game, there are too many other things for them to do.
As a result of these studies, many possible changes to the way the game is managed and played have been discussed and many tried with little success. I won’t bore you with a list of the changes that have been considered and the ones that are being tried on the Minor League level this year but will say that nothing baseball has done so far and nothing that they will do in the future has or will make a significant impact upon the length of games.
I also don’t need to tell you that the audience that they are trying to attract, which includes not only children but also the parents that would take them to the game, all spend a large portion of their lives glued to some kind of electronic device. The electronic evolution of this target group starts with videos in the cradle or car seat, advances through video game devices, to lap tops, to tablets, to smart phones and now to more advanced forms of “Artificial Intelligence.”
The Baseball Gods are right, they have a problem attracting this demographic. However, like Jim, they are working on the wrong end of the mop. This segment of the population, the ‘Connected People’, as I like to call them, prefer soccer to the other major sports, both to play and to watch.
So, why do they prefer soccer, a game in which 22 people go back and forth on a huge field, rarely doing anything exciting except for those four or five times during a game when someone actually takes a shot at the goal and most high scoring games end 2-1 and most other games end 1-0?
Why do these parents encourage their children to play soccer? Why do we now have international soccer games on television every day of the week? And, most importantly, why is soccer taking kids away from playing baseball, watching baseball on television and going to the ballpark?
The reason is simple! Soccer attracts this generation of plugged in, turned off, non social young people and their parents because it is so SLOW!!
What a conundrum. Baseball is supposedly losing audience to soccer because it is too slow and soccer is taking that audience away because it is so slow.
Think about it. There is so little real action in a soccer game that you can spend almost the whole game on your device or taking selfies without missing anything. On that rare occasion when someone advances on the goal and might score, the unplugged in people in the crowd begin to make noise long before the shot is taken, alerting the plugged-ins that it is time to pause their device and look.
From a plugged-in parent’s point of view, if your child is playing soccer, you can text or use whatever device you want for the vast majority of the game without missing anything on the field.
Baseball’s problem is not that it’s too slow, it’s too FAST!! There is too much going on all the time to allow these people to devote enough time to their devices and connections.
Speeding the game up by reducing the time between pitches, starting extra inning games with a man on second base and all the other fixes baseball is looking at will only reduce the amount of time available to be plugged in.
Like Jim with the mop, baseball is working on the wrong end of the problem, the problem is the target population, not the game.
What’s the solution? As long as America, like the rest of the world, stays and becomes increasingly more plugged in, there is no solution. I’d like to think that, eventually, we’ll turn a corner and parents will again encourage their children to put down the devices and pick up the bikes and balls and go outside but that does not seem realistic at this point in time.
For those of you like me, who were lucky to have been born before the world became plugged in, we can be thankful that we were encouraged to and took the time to enjoy the greatest game ever invented.
For some reason, I think that it was better to be plugged in to Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Willie Mays and the rest of those great players than to Alexa or Siri.
— Carl Johnson lives in Sanford and writes a weekly baseball column for the Journal Tribune Sunday. Contact him atbaseballworldbjt@yahoo.com and check out his blog at baseballworldbjt.com.
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