Poll Shows Popularity Of Pro Football Continues Growing While Baseball Slides - SportsBusiness Daily | SportsBusiness Journal

Poll Shows Popularity Of Pro Football Continues Growing While Baseball Slides - SportsBusiness Daily | SportsBusiness Journal:

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Much has been written about baseball, the national pastime, although it almost defies description. Resembling chess with finely shaded details and subtle strategies; it is as common as many things in our history, each player standing around in familiar positions. Its languid pace, long season, saturation of coverage through the large network of minor leagues, huge field of play, and history dating back to the late 1800s make it a unique part of American culture.

Some like baseball for its cleanliness, the stark white home uniforms and exact chalk baselines. It is a game in which numbers tell a story: baseball fans recall vital statistics better than football fans. Author George F. Will believes overall its fans are smarter than their gridiron counterparts. Nevertheless, as Sports Business Daily reported (see link above) Jan. 26, 2011, Harris-interactive poll shows those adults surveyed favored professional football over baseball by a wide margin. As an example, television ratings for any big NFL game amount to a 20 share compared to a 10 share for baseball. Football involves careful pacing, repetition, and the short attention span of the male observer; men huddle, agree to a plan, line up, hit each other, run around like crazy, call time, rest, regroup, and then try again. Over and over this goes up and down like the returns on a stock. It is violent, yet stylized warfare, where combatants can get a bonus for damaging another man's body. Baseball is intricate, comfortable, and convivial, like a picnic game only with occasional crowd noise.

Like our country’s history, baseball’s place in my own story is significant. I played the game every year from grade school on, although not well; attending games through high school, college, and law school. I’ve been to Wrigley, Fenway, Comiskey, and Yankee Stadium; Fulton County for a World Series and Omaha for a College World Series. My first summer of college, UT won the NCAA national championship, and at the old Arlington Stadium I saw Nolan Ryan’s seventh no-hitter. It weaves in and out of my life like a tapestry, its timelessness sealed within memories. I courted my wife at the Ballpark and watched the strangest World Series (game 6) ever last October with my parents. Many of baseball’s great moments are “mano-a-mano” showdowns similar to a duel in the streets, lived out in slow motion; one punch at a time. It seems more like art than sport, a reflection of culture, as well as an integral part of it.

Maybe because of its history, baseball is a frequent canvass on which is depicted modern culture: George Will’s Men at Work, Movie: The Natural, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, John Feinstein’s Play Ball, Movie: A League of Their Own, Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, Movies: Moneyball, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, the road trip saga by David Lamb, called A Stolen Season, Don DeLillo’s Underworld about the shot heard round the world, or Chad Harbach's debut novel, The Art of Fielding, is as much about literary fiction as it is about baseball. These few examples come to mind, but it is a sport which for decades has been discussed voluminously in all kinds of media. Authors love to write about this sport.

During the 2009 season, despite the nation’s worst economic downturn in 80 years, 30 Major League Baseball clubs drew 73,418,479 fans during the season, producing the fifth largest total attendance in MLB history. New stadiums, often financed by public funds, have been built in place of almost all the monolithic old concrete wonders of the 1970s. Youth leagues produce local product woven into the fabric of small-town America, culminating each year with the Little League World Series, a spectacle not unlike the World Cup in its international coverage. Baseball is still popular even though the research shows that football is the preferred national sport in the new century.

Popularity over Preference

Football is more technological, with slow-motion TV replay an integral part of officiating. It is like the modern mechanized corporate world in which we live, often called the ultimate team sport. When cultures change so do their games; baseball harkens back to more serene, agricultural economy which works with no deadlines, only outcomes. Until you get 27 outs the game is uncertain. Football has a time clock, used almost like a factory laborer punches out, ending the work day.

Quoting George Carlin, “football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.” Carlin concludes, “Baseball’s object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I'll be safe at home!”

Demographics is Destiny

Another relevant question is whether baseball has been eclipsed by other sports within the growing minority cultures of African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans?

In traditional Hispanic markets the World Cup draws much higher interest than baseball and in poor African-American high schools, the chances of earning college scholarships are much better in football than baseball. "A Division 1 football program can give out 85 scholarships, and baseball teams only 11.7," said Jimmie Lee Solomon, and EVP of MLB. "If you're an African American kid and you need help to go to school, do the math."

A regular fan of the sporting life enjoys many different games, the balls and rules representing all the facets of the athletic pop-culture. Baseball will have to live with a smaller market share and aging fan base, as it plays with a smaller ball; like the paradigm shift brought on my Billy Beane in Moneyball, focusing on base-runners getting across home plate. Baseball continues to drive fans to big stadiums, reaching mostly the 40+ age group with family friendly daytime experiences in beautiful pastoral settings. Conversely, live professional football and basketball venues resemble a gentlemen’s club, or worse a strip joint. Super Bowl halftime shows don't fit within the confines of the modern ballpark.

Baseball is still an innocent game, despite the recent PED scandals, and congressional hearings. Since the Black Sox threw the World Series in 1919, scandal revisits periodically and baseball proves resilient. Symmetrical stitches endlessly wrap around the baseball, just as hope renews with training camp every year in warm destinations as the first bright days of spring burst into blue skies. The season ends in the cold chill of approaching winter. Cyclical like the laces of the ball itself, there is never a greater hope for fans as there is in spring training, the whole season in the future. As fans do every year in the dry Arizona heat, or looking at prospects in the Florida sun, let us join in the wonder: could this be their season?

©Mark H. Pillsbury
(composed 03/07/2012, pictures for personal use and historical reference)

Part III: The Funeral of Shelby Austin

(Photo: AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

“What the f*<k you mean I ain’t invited?!” Gerri shouted at the large man outfitted entirely in black, holding a walkie-talkie. “She was my wife, for Chr^st sake!”

Just inside the narthex of the huge New Hope Baptist church in Atlanta, Georgia, the scene played out with crowds surging inside the sanctuary.

The dark clouds over a noontime Atlanta sky heightened the somber mood of the congregants, even though Gerri Green’s passion was crackling like lightening inside the foyer of the church.

He leaned into the security guard but pointed toward the front of the building, where displayed upon a raised bier was a platinum casket with silver handles, adorned with hundreds of red roses, and covered by black velvet; appropriate for the saddest pop icon the world knew, Shelby Austin, otherwise known as the “Voice.”

Pleading and arguing at the same time, Gerri said, “This is not right, my man; Shelby was my life. I have to sit up front, I was her husband?!” The guard, unmoved, retorted dryly, “You were her husband, Gerri,” “You’re not family anymore, and only family are sitting upfront. Period.”

The big security guard was doing the pointing now, “no one gets up there without me escorting them.” 

But Gerri was gone...

He moved like a cat, avoiding the nine-lives bestowed upon a feline, swiftly pushing open the two swinging oak doors and walking right up to the center aisle of the church under the watchful eyes of mourners. Just like Gerri to demand the attention of the moment, he stopped right in front of the pewter colored box and dropped to one knee, doffing his black fedora. You could have heard a pin drop to the old slate floor.

All week Shelby struggled with her addictions and the impending 4^th trip to a very private rehab clinic near Sedona, Arizona. Jittery at rehearsals for the Grammys® and avoiding accountability from her handlers, Shelby was going to have one last “good” weekend in L.A. before trying to kick pills and booze once again, helped by professionals. Her mentor Clive Davis’ party at the Beverly Hills Hilton was the warm-up for Sunday’s awards ceremony at which she was scheduled to sing. The practice sessions were dreadful, but she kept assuring Clive that she was quitting cigarettes, getting healthy.

Gerri Green did not force the Voice to lace her marijuana cigarettes with base cocaine, but by the end of their tumultuous 15-year marriage they were buying kilos of the drug to blow together. The weight of his guilt and the reality of her passing drew him here today, even though he was not welcomed.

“I am so sorry for what I have done, God.” Gerri prayed at her coffin. “Keep her and protect her,” he was tearful yet defiant, he could feel the daggers in his back as thousands stared, seeing him as to blame somehow for her death. “She was your angel, Lord, take her back now; thank you for my time, for her love.” Gerri got up slowly, kissed the index and middle fingers of his right hand, and touched the sealed coffin, dropping his head and turning just as the security team reached him. “Good-bye, sugar,” he said, looking back toward Shelby.

He could barely walk down the aisle, the retinue almost carried him by the elbows. All agility and power were gone, seemingly left at the foot of the coffin with his prayers. Gerri Green was a broken, forlorn man retreating toward the rear of the chapel. The squawking walkie-talkies chirped over the silent stares of each row as he was escorted out ignominiously, like a criminal on a perp-walk, destination: an Atlanta police car.

She could not beat this devil, nor the others that haunted her; Gerri Green was the personification of the wrong turns her life took in the 1990s, from which Shelby Austin never recovered. Now she was free. Even though her body was tightly enclosed in front of the throngs of friends and admirers assembled here today, later to be laid to rest; her soul was in heaven. Shelby was singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among the angels, and making music to the Lord with a joyful heart.

Life is lived either moving toward God or away from Him. Shelby’s commitment to her Lord wavered over the journey through fame, which turned out to be a cortege. All our most lovely moments perhaps are timeless, and so it was as Gerri made his way out of the church and into a waiting cab; he heard the song playing on the Atlanta FM station, surely commemorating the somber ceremony about to start behind him. It was the song that always reminded him of her love, and he hated to share the damn thing with millions of fans. The warmth he felt of the “good old days” of which the song reminded him, was surely the illusion of timelessness, and yet he was sure Shelby would have wanted to say good-bye before he left.

As the song played on the car radio, he spoke to her again, ripping apart inside, but with a proud exterior, “dear Shelby, I will miss you so much, you were the best thing that ever happened to me and I screwed it all up!” “Please forgive me and watch over Bobbi Kristina. I will always love you.”

“Now drive!” he screamed to the cab-driver, and it was over; he could look toward the church no longer.

©Mark H. Pillsbury
[this is a fictional account partly based on real life characters, not meant to be factual; it is a dramatization of Whitney Houston's funeral, any other similarities are coincidental]