Hirp On...

This week in baseball, a big controversial story has been about the comments made by Gary Sheffield. (hey, he’s Dwight Gooden’s nephew) Sheffield, went on record with GQ magazine saying that there are more Latino players in the game today than African-American players, because they are more controllable. Well, his statement itself was a bit careless and inaccurate, but it does bright the spotlight to a very important baseball fact. The game is losing black players.

Which means something much bigger, it’s losing black fans. Personally, I don’t think that it’s some big racist conspiracy. I think marketing is to blame. Bo the fantastic marketing done by the NBA and NFL the past twenty-five years, and the horrible marketing done by baseball. Ask a baseball fan what defines the past 25 years, and I bet their answer includes: work stoppages, home runs and steroids, Cal Ripken, Barry Bonds, the evil Yankees and their payroll and a cancelled World Series. Ask the same question to an NBA fan, and you’ll hear: Jordan, Bird, Magic, Shaq, Kobe, the Bulls, the Dream Team and LeBron.

What you don’t hear is that baseball has had seven different champions the past seven years, all without a salary cap that allegedly evens the playing field. Yet the NBA has only seen seven different champions in the past 20 years. That’s right, count it. Bulls, Lakers, Rockets, Spurs, Pistons, Heat, and Celtics. Oh, and the Celtics haven’t won since 1986. The NFL has had seven different Super Bowl Champions in the last nine years.

Baseball spends too much time talking about how it’s going to fix its problems, which of course it should do, but in the meantime it should be highlighting how great the game is. Those in charge have depended on fathers to turn their sons on to the game, but that isn’t realistic in this day and age. While the NFL has games once a week, almost all of which start early enough so that kids can see entire games, baseball is starting World Series games at 8pm eastern.

Also, baseball waits to celebrate and market its players until they are on the verge of something great. Cal Ripken was the center of the baseball world for breaking Lou Gehrigs consecutive game streak. LeBron James was the biggest thing in basketball while he was still in high school. Basketball looks forward, while baseball looks backwards. Instead of focusing on Ken Griffey Jr. in the mid 90’s, baseball had to recover from a work stoppage that cost us a World Series.

As great a job as they have done at growing the game over-seas, bringing in players from the far-east and Latin America, baseball has been losing fans at home. It’s all marketing. The NBA gained fans world wide with The Dream Team, and we went from dominating basketball globally to losing in international competition and having three MVP’s in a row won by someone born outside the US.

Sheffield is wrong in his reasoning, but right to be concerned. And if you don’t like baseball and just read all of this, don’t worry, I’ll write about “Entourage” and Knocked-Up either later today or tomorrow.