How to Cure Baseball

I haven't written a blog in a long time, favoring Facebook over Blogger. But this past weekend I got to return to my hometown in Gilroy California and I was consequently re-immersed into a culture that loves Baseball.

Growing up, I loved baseball more than any of my friends. I was fanatical. I remember being in 6th grade and running to find the newspaper in order to memorize all the most updated stats that had been achieved the previous day. And on Christmas morning, if 90% of my presents didn't have the San Francisco Giants logo on them, then Christmas wasn't successful.

I even stuck through the baseball strike of1994-1995. A year and a half with no baseball. MLB suffered and many baseball fans turned to other sports, never to cast their eyes back at the sport they used to love. I stayed with it, and when the players finally came back, I was their first fan.

Eventually I went off to college. Not only did I move to a state that had no professional baseball team and no televised or radio access to the Giants, but my studies and part-time job kept me on campus from 7am to 11:30pm (literally) every single day. Needless to say, I lost track of baseball. I still watched the playoffs and World Series for a few years, but eventually Baseball took a backseat to more important things.

...like college football. Growing up, I had never been a football fan. Never. I tried to like it for years, but I could never get into it. College changed all of that. Suddenly the game made sense, and it also helped that I now had an alma mater that I could cheer for.

I quickly learned that football was widely loved by most people, while baseball was loved only by a very select few. As a matter of fact, I was hard pressed to find a single person in my 3 years at BYU that even remotely enjoyed baseball.

For the past 7 or 8 years, college football has filled my thirst for sports. But in the past few months, I've been finding myself more and more interested (re-interested) in baseball. After all it was the sport that I devoted so much of my life to.

So I've been thinking: why is it that a majority of people don't care for baseball but adore football? Sure, if you live in the Bay Area, or in Boston or New York (for example), most people will live and breathe baseball. But, having lived in two states now that have no pro baseball teams, I can say with full confidence that most people love football, and not baseball.

The reason is this: every football game counts. Every football game is crucial to the team's standings and to their possibilities of getting to the playoffs or to the coveted bowl game. In baseball, each team plays approximately seven million games a year. The games aren't important for themselves. If you miss a game, no big deal; it will barely put a dent in their standings if they lose anyway.

Here's the solution: baseball needs to go the way of football. They should have about 20 games in a season. Period. One a week for 20 weeks. I don't care that the reason football has only one game a week is to let the players physically recover, and that baseball players don't need to recover (other than pitchers). Big deal.

Baseball should play one game a week, let's say Saturdays (great day for a ballgame). This way, each team would have one starting pitcher that would pitch every week. He would become the "quarterback" of the team. Commercial products would glamorize him and clothing would be created in his name. He would lead the team. You'd have your second and third stringers as well but they'd rarely play.

You could raise ticket prices a bit to make up for lost revenue, but consider this. Rarely does a baseball stadium sell out for a game (there are a select few that are always full, but as a whole, very few). Therefore, if you held only 20 games, one a week, people would flock to that one game as they do with football. Take the tickets sold for the previous 5 games of a normal season (as it is now) and cram them into the stadium on that one day. They wouldn't lose any money. Not to mention the rise in revenue from more effective product placement and glamorization of the sport.

Then come the playoffs. Single elimination, just like football. The World Series? You do one game. It would be as big as the Super Bowl.

There, I've solved baseball's issue. Do it my way and baseball would have 10 times the fans it does now. Sadly, this will never happen. And so, while I am becoming more interested in finding a way to follow baseball again in my MLB-less state of Nevada, I will stick to my college football and catch the occasional baseball scoreboard.