Baseball is your spouse. Football is your fling.
Baseball requires your constant attention and rewards you for your diligence and loyalty. Football asks that you stop by just once a week, at which point it treats you to a sensory smorgasbord.
This baseball town’s occupation by Super Bowl mania will come to a thankful end Sunday night, when the Broncos and Seahawks face off in the XLVIIIth such game at dreary MetLife Stadium. If being exposed up close and personal to the hype this past week has drove home any wisdom, it’s this:
Baseball — or any other sport or entertainment entity, for that matter — just can’t touch football. It’s best for Major League Baseball’s commissioner, teams and players to shrug off this phenomenon as a liability of our species and just do its own thing.
Compared against its own history, MLB continues to surge. It passed the $8 billion mark in revenues in 2013, and this year, it will kick off an eight-year, $12.4 billion television deal (with FOX, ESPN and TBS) that doubles the annual value of the prior agreement. The last 10 years, 2004-13, have produced the 10 highest season-attendance totals in the game’s history.
Nevertheless, it would be both negligent and un-human for baseball folks not to be aware of the phenomenon that is the National Football League. In baseball circles, there’s awe at the grasp the NFL has on the public, on how it appears impervious to the greater trend of increased TV options resulting in lower TV ratings. There’s frustration with illegal performance-enhancing drugs being viewed as a problem of cataclysmic proportions in baseball and a mere inconvenience in football, even as NFL players seem to get bigger and stronger.
Indians president Mark Shapiro, who played football at Princeton and is a brother-in-law of former Jets and Browns coach Eric Mangini, attributed football’s success to its scarcity — with just 16 regular-season games, each one becomes an “event” — and its TV-friendly nature.
Remember the 2003 Visa commercial starring Derek Jeter and George Steinbrenner, in which they had fun over The Boss’ public criticisms of Jeter’s social life? That was the brainchild of advertising guru Jimmy Siegel, who now runs his own shop Siegel Strategies.
“There’s something more gladiatorial about football that gets the adrenaline going,” Siegel said.
Throw in the opportunities for gambling and fantasy football, and you have yourself a juggernaut.
Alas, as you’ve heard from every manager ever, there’s no sense in worrying about things you can’t control. So baseball folks have focused on improving their own product.
“We’re in a lot of businesses,” Larry Baer, president and CEO of the San Francisco Giants, said Friday in a telephone interview. “We’re in the business of winning games, but we’re also delivering content and entertainment.”
I reached out to Baer specifically because the Giants, who opened beautiful AT&T Park in 2000 (as Pacific Bell Park), have helped transform San Francisco into more of a baseball town, putting a dent in the hold the 49ers held on the Northern California city. Of course, it also helped that the 49ers didn’t put together good teams for about a decade.
“What I’m most proud of is, it’s not just increasingly a baseball town in addition to football, but when you look at the fans in our ballpark, you see kids all over the place,” Baer said. “There are kids wearing Panda hats [for Pablo Sandoval], [Tim] Lincecum wigs, ‘Bust a Pose’ T-shirts [for Buster Posey].”
Marketing of its players has been MLB’s great white whale.
“I think [the NFL] does a great job marketing themselves,” Siegel said, “probably better than Major League Baseball.”
Much of that can be attributed not to any relative levels of competence, but rather the sports’ schedules and cultures. With games scheduled for 162 out of 183 days — that’s three or four days off per month — baseball players possess far less free time than their fellow professional athletes. Football players, meanwhile, seem particularly aware of their profession’s risks and, knowing they probably will need to find a new job sooner than later, are more open to using media to their advantage.
And, as Siegel said, “Football has more edge. Its players have more edge. There’s the ‘Look at me!’ preening. Baseball is relatively much duller.”
That’s anthropological. Jeter stands out for expertly walking the tightrope between marketing one’s self while not showing off. In baseball, the player who volunteers to get miked up for a telecast often will draw eye rolls from teammates.
Within these physical and spiritual limits, MLB has expanded its brand with the likes of its “Fan Cave” in downtown Manhattan, as well as its new deal with MTV that will showcase players.
“A real priority for our industry is to focus on how we can take what’s working well in the local markets and shift it to the national model,” Baer said. “There’s concern about that, sure.”
What’s interesting to wonder, too, is whether baseball and other runners-up can capitalize on the NFL’s missteps, most notably its appalling neglect of player concussions as reported in the book “League of Denial” by
Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada and the accompanying documentary by PBS. Will fewer families allow their sons to play football? Will fans finally yield to their better angels and not support an activity that ruins so many participants’ lives?
“While the talent could thin due to a possible decline in youth participation, I would doubt that viewership would be negatively impacted,” Shapiro said. “The game is almost a made-for-TV product that has a growing appeal regardless of the evolution of sports as entertainment.”
Sports Illustrated media analyst Richard Deitsch pointed out on Twitter that last week’s Pro Bowl drew 11.4 million viewers, while last year’s All-Star Game, at Citi Field, drew 11 million viewers. The Pro Bowl is a virtual afterthought for the NFL — shoot, the two best teams don’t even send their players. The All-Star Game is a critical, jewel event for baseball.
It can be a depressing landscape for baseball when folks naturally compare it to football. The key, then, is for baseball to ignore those comparisons. For it to take comfort in its sheer volume of people who come to games and watch them, if not with the same intensity, and in the long-term value of being a spouse rather than a fling.
“One great thing about baseball, especially where we are, we feel like a town center,” Baer said. “People come to our ballpark to celebrate. To mourn. … People want to spend holidays, birthdays, anniversary celebrations with us.
“In the rhythm of your life and your community, baseball occupies a unique place in that respect.”