March 28, 2005
Popularity Contest
Michael Gee in the Boston Herald looks at Baseball's popularity:
Baseball is just like Broadway. Both look like dying businesses until you try to buy a ticket.
Motion pictures, radio, and TV were all going to ruin live theater. High costs spelled doom for stage shows in 1905 and 2005. Broadway was called ``The Fabulous Invalid'' over 50 years ago.
Those who tried to score orchestra seats for the original cast version of ``The Producers'' found the invalid in robust health. Either they paid a bundle or more often they were out of luck.
Baseball's no different. The big leagues have existed for more than a century in which their demise was always right around the corner.
``Go back as far as you want,'' Players Association head Don Fehr once said. ``Two things are always true. No team ever had enough pitching and no team ever made any money.''
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Posted by David Pinto at
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The comparison to Broadway isn't one that makes me feel really good, since while it's still difficult to get a ticket to a Broadway show, musical and stage shows are long passed being the centerpiece and driving force for popular entertainment. It's a niche audience. You've got a small segment of the population who really gets into it and you've got tourists who go to shows while in NY because it's just one of those things you're supposed to do as a tourist in NY.
No, not going out of business, but not what the majority of Americans talk about around the water cooler.
Heaven help us if baseball is headed down that same path. It's difficult to still call baseball the "national pastime" with a straight face, but, hopefully, it'll be a long time before it becomes to popular sport what Broadway is to popular entertainment.
Both suffer from being dominant at the birth of television (although talent started leaving Broadway from the beginning of movies on); thus we have plenty of visual evidence that they used to be bigger. No one laments the death of Chatauqua.
I also think about what Neyer wrote (IIRC) a couple of years ago; who cares how popular baseball is with other people, as long as we hardcore types have access to it? If baseball were less popular, maybe I could get out of the Dodger Stadium parking lot in under 45 minutes.
Or consider the NHL: while I am (was) pleased that the good people of Tennessee have access to high-level hockey, my own enjoyment of the Canadiens isn't really affected that much.
