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| "Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away..." |
If MLB, or any other corporate sportsball, wanted to engage a new generation of sportsball fans, they'd show that by moving to change ticket prices by moving the decimal point one place to the left at every park in their leagues. Maybe even two.
I'm not griping about the recockulous salaries of the players, but in order to pay them, the sport - any sport - has soaked the fans to the point that going to a game is an exercise in pointless nostalgia about a sport made of entirely of prima donas, both on the field, and in owners' boxes, in a financial exercise for fans who show up in person that makes Disneyland seem like a non-profit effort. Taking an average family to a game, and buying everyone a hot dog, beverage, and bag of peanuts is currently an field trip that requires selling a kidney to finance, in order to watch multi-millionaire corporate pawns try to gin up enthusiasm for other corporations' paid sumo wrestlers. The only people who actually give a flying f**k anymore are Vegas oddsmakers, which is only fair, since they're the only ones with more at stake than the players or the owners.
Which explains why watching any pro sports nowadays has all the compelling allure of televising the trading pits on Wall Street. Give day traders hand weapons like swords and axes, and televise their fights, and you might find something people would truly enjoy watching, and at far higher levels of enthusiasm for anything happening between epically-long commercial swaths on TV. Truth in advertising?
"We now interrupt this forty-minute orgy of bad commercials to bring you five minutes of corporate sport."
A little too on-the-nose there? You betcha.
You might as well televise corporate board meetings, and let the underlings stage kabuki-theater knife fights or brass-knuckled dust-ups. It would be as compelling to the audience.
Nobody not criminally stoopid gives a wet fart about multimillionaire children playing a children's game for lottery-payout annual salaries. These are not "enduring examples of excellence", they're simply the highest paid racehorses and whores in society, albeit for demonstrable skills.
Frankly, I'd rather get a hot dog from a sidewalk cart vendor, and watch a pickup game at the local sandlot, played by any 18 total unpaid amateurs, of any age from pre-teen to retiree. The game is identical, the sportsmanship higher, and the stakes far more important to those on the field than anything happening at Corporate Sponsorship Monstrosities.
Eff Sportsball, for any value of that term. The main difference between pro wrestling and any version of Pro Sportsball is everyone knows pro wrestling is totally fake and ghey. Field of Dreams has transmogrified into Field Of Used To Be. There's hardly anyone under the age of 40 now who even remembers what it is they used to watch, unless they're watching Ken Burns' Baseball documentary. The sport memorialized in the docu-epic is deader than dinosaurs, deader than canned tuna.
To quote two other lines from popular entertainment:
"It's dead, Jim."
"Let it go."
12 comments:
At least it's cheap to watch sports on TV...
*sees NFL playoff games available exclusively on streaming services*
Ohhhhh.
Sports is still decent on a smaller scale- supporting your local high school or minor league team can be enjoyable in the way college & pros aren't.
Nobody actually forced anyone to watch sports....let alone pay money to do so.
Of course sportsball is the circuses part of the "bread and circuses" scheme to
keep the sheep pacified. Beer and pizza comprising the other half. Our society
is getting the treatment it deserves. We have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Even a minor league game seen live is a full-day event.
The one I went to started at 6 pm and they were only halfway done by the time I left at 10.
Who has time for that after a full day of work?
Totally agree! Televised sports are dead to me, but high school ball games of any type are awesome.
Sports are merely a way for most people to outsource their own sports fantasies. They sit in their seats, whether in a stadium or in front of a TV, and imagine THEY are the one at the plate or are barreling down a sideline. The crowd is cheering for THEM. Their brain is generating endorphins in high gear.
Sports fans talk about how "we" beat Boston on Saturday, or how "we" need to find a new quarterback this year. I am reminded of the series, "The Pacific." In the last episode, actor James Badge Dale, playing a Marine just home from the war, is at the family dinner table. His father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, pompously drones on about how "we" did that and how "we should have done this" in the war. Dale responds, "I don't recall you being there." So it is with sports.
It's not cheap but the money that's made is not the ticket sales going in to the stadium. Ticket sales exist to nomonally keep the stadium where it is for the game to be televised or "streamed". The money that's made for the owners of a team and the players is the merch sales and TV payments. They really don't care about who goes physically to games anymore. Why do you think they can flex games and move them around at will? screw people who made plans and are traveling from out of town anyway.
@Jester,
Exactly why owners should stop screwing the in-person fans.
Ticket prices for field-level seats shouldn't cost like front-row tickets to Taylor Swift.
If they are, the uniforms should be silver foil minidresses, and the players should be women shaking their asses.
Be all one thing, or all the other.
Charging whorehouse prices and delivering ugly fat chicks in birkhas should be criminalized.
I completely agree with your thoughts on this one! As a husband and father of a boy who loves the game, playing and watching, i do still have to take them out to the ballpark on the regular. The solution was to start going to the closest minor league stadium.. Tickets, and concessions, are inexpensive. The players are more accessible - think walk to the bullpen fence or next to the dugout if you want - and the game is still very good and very real.
I’m very blessed to live in a big enough area that supports the several teams that compose the league. Ymmv but it works for us.
While not currently forced to watch sportsball teams most of us are forced to pay for the tax subsidies the stadiums get.
If they were smart, they'd triple the number of teams. We have roughly the same number of teams with a much higher population. More teams, more stadiums, lower prices. There's plenty of talent. Same with NFL.
My favorite pro sport to watch is Grand Sumo on the NHK channel. Speed, power, tradition, and mutual respect displayed. No big mouthed bragging or taunting. I used to think of Sumo as two fat guys in diapers bumping bellies. Once I took the time to learn the history and various holds and moves, it became very enjoyable to watch. No weight classifications. All different shapes and sizes competing against each other. Take time to study about Sumo and watch the Tournament highlights and you may just find a pro sport that you can enjoy.
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