Scott Craven pens a nice essay on the hold of baseball over its fans.
There are other sports that may be considered more popular than baseball when judged by the numbers. TV ratings for football are almost unapproachable. NASCAR races routinely draw more than 100,000 fans to ovals across the country.
But numbers are too logical to explain our romanticism with baseball, Bellamy says.
“If you go by metrics, by statistics, baseball doesn’t do very well,” he says. “But the sport is about much more than that. It brings about feelings that are hard to quantify.”
Baseball is Coca-Cola. It may not win the taste test, but it’s fans are deeply loyal.
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I agree with that. Baseball fans are unique in that we love everything about the game and I mean everything; we count every pitch, swing, and catch as if each play was important.
How about cumulative number? Yeah, NASCAR packs a TON of people into an oval once a week, but how many people go to the ballpark every week? More than 100,000. Baseball covers that in a handful of games, but each team plays 162 games a year. And how about cumulative ratings for TV? Football is watched on Sundays, but baseball is watched 7 days a week. You can’t just compare numbers on a per-event basis, let’s look at numbers for the whole year.
Sabenar said what I wanted to, the NFL and NASCAR boast “loyal” fans who spend 3 hours a week watching all the action. A real baeball fan spends 18-21 hours, 26 weeks a year following their team.
BASEBALL IS LIFE
There’s nothing like hearing the “crack” of the ball on the bat. Nothing like seeing a home run soar. Nothing like baseball. Period. Baseball IS life. It is the ONLY reason I own a t.v.