It seems I’m constantly having those: “I can’t believe these people” moments. Things always seem to happen that just don’t make much sense to me and I honestly don’t see how they make sense to rational people either. These moments often revolve around sports fans.
The most recent of these “I can’t believe these people” moments has to do with television ratings of a regular season, meaningless NFL week six blowout game versus those of a huge, primetime and big time playoff matchup that turned into one of the greatest postseason pitching performances in baseball history.
According to tvbythenumbers.com, 9.6 million people watched the Tennessee Titans trump the Jacksonville Jaguars 30-3 on ESPN’s Monday Night Football on Oct. 18, while only 8.2 million people watched TBS’s telecast of game three of the American League Championship Series playoff baseball game between the Texas Rangers and the New York Yankees that same night and time.
Now, I know that football is the most-watched sport in this country and that is obvious and has been for some time, but it is still a head-scratcher to me that more people would want to watch a regular season, nothing at stake NFL game between honestly two uninteresting teams than a thrilling pitcher’s duel matchup between Benton’s own Cliff Lee, of the Rangers, and Yankees star Andy Pettitte.
On top of all of that, Lee’s performance against the Yankees, while allowing only two hits and striking out an incredible 13 batters, who aren’t slobs by the way, while shutting them out might be one of the 10 greatest postseason pitching performances in baseball history.
I’ve always wondered why a regular season NFL game would draw more viewers than a tight, postseason Major League Baseball broadcast or even more preposterous why a televised NFL preseason game would out draw a regular season MLB game.
The answers that sports fans have always given me have never seemed fulfilling. The answer is usually as simple as: “football is just better.” Every now and then, I’ll receive the more elaborate: “football is more exciting and just has more action than baseball” or “there is too much stoppage time in baseball or time when nothing is happening.”
Well, the facts are that football honestly doesn’t have any more or less action then baseball. There also isn’t any more stoppage time or time when nothing is occurring.
This is going to sound either funny, stupid or too philosophical to some, but each sport has action except for when there isn’t any.
What I mean by this is that the action in baseball starts with the pitch, which means there is constant action once the pitch is made, even if the ball isn’t batted into play. The action in a football game begins with the snap of the football. The time between the pitch in baseball and the snap in football is what I’m referring to as stoppage time and the amount of time in between the two is roughly the same. In between the pitch and the snap are mind games being played between the pitcher/catcher and batter in baseball and the offense and defense in football, which leads to a different action.
If any argument could be made as far as having less action, it could be made that there is actually less constant action in a football game, because in football you have halftime, which is roughly 20 minutes long, as opposed to the mere two to three minutes in between baseball innings.
Some fans also make the argument that baseball games are longer than football games and that baseball doesn’t fit into the increasingly small attention span of most Americans.
Sure, a baseball game doesn’t have a game clock and could essentially last all day long if it had too, but in most cases a baseball game is three hours long, which is also roughly the same length of a football game with the halftime, timeouts and commercial breaks thrown in.
This probably seems like a lot to think about and many sports fans don’t want a whole lot of thinking thrown into their sports. However, these reasons seem better to me than the ignorantly cliché “football is just better” statement.
When it comes down to it the two sports are similar in the amount of action that actually occurs during the timeframe of the event. This brings back the question: why do more people prefer meaningless, regular season football games over important, postseason baseball games?
The answer would seem to be a subjective one: the majority of sports fans just prefer football over baseball. Each fan will have their reasons why or why not, but one thing is certain in my mind: “just because” just doesn’t cut it.
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