Analyst makes bold statement about baseball's popularity

When Chris Broussard was growing up, he viewed baseball just like he did football and basketball.

The Fox Sports personality appeared on Ethan Strauss’s House of Strauss podcast recently and explained the problem — at least from his perspective — of Major League Baseball’s declining popularity.

Broussard’s argument boils down to the sport losing ground due to its slow pace, lack of flashy plays compared to basketball, and society’s shorter attention span. In essence, he believes that baseball struggles to hold fan interest throughout the season and suggests a shorter schedule could be a solution.

“I think what propelled football to its current status is fantasy football,” he said. “I think the gambling, I think the interest in having your team and following it — that was in the 90s, and I think football really just skyrocketed and left every other sport behind. I think basketball, David Stern did a tremendous job of marketing individuals rather than the teams. There might be some negatives to that, but when you think of the NBA, every team has somebody that you want to see, and then the sport itself lends itself to showing off the athletes’ creativity and athletic ability and things like that.

“Baseball, as a sport, it’s a slower sport. And it doesn’t lend itself as much to showing off the athleticism — like basketball. You just can’t be as creative in baseball as you can be in basketball — dunking in basketball, dribbling between your legs, all of that, behind-the-back passes — it’s just the nature of the sport. I think just because it’s so slow, and you can literally watch a baseball game and not see much action for a long time. I think that’s hurt the sport.

“And as our society has become a faster, more ‘I need it now’ society, our attention spans are shorter. I used to, as a kid, watch baseball on TV and really just watch a game. But now everything is so much faster that you almost get conditioned to needing immediate action, and I do think that’s hurt baseball.”

Broussard hates to say this, but he feels like baseball is almost a niche sport.

“You got that group that likes it and plays it… almost like hockey to some degree or soccer,” Broussard added. “The numbers show that the next generation, as you said, is not playing in it like it used to.”

Strauss highlighted an interesting inconsistency. The World Series gets roughly the same viewership as the NBA Finals. Yet, in everyday sports conversations, baseball seems to be left out. For example, on national shows like First Things First , Nick Wright might talk about the NBA all the time but rarely discuss following a team like the Kansas City Royals in MLB.

Baseball doesn’t seem to be a natural topic for these debates.

“When I first started doing First Take on ESPN with Skip (Bayless), I remember it was like October, so the baseball playoffs were going on,” said Broussard. “I don’t know if it was the World Series or just the playoffs, and we were talking NFL football and basketball. We may have done one topic on baseball, and I’m sitting here like, ‘These are the Championship Series; how are we not talking about baseball? We’re talking more about Week 4 of the NFL.’ And then they explained that the surveys were showing in the study groups they did with people when you start talking baseball, the ratings plummeted.

“And it’s the same on national radio. Our show, The Odd Couple , talks baseball. We don’t talk a lot, but we talk more than most national shows. Locally, it’s still very talked about, but nationally, it really is not on the radar. Even on First Things First . We have our wilds, weird and wonderful, and that’s where we get our baseball highlights in. But we did not talk hardly any World Series stuff, which is incredible.

“And I think as far as the ratings, and I’ll be honest, again, I think it’s some of the change in our society. I think the reason that the playoffs and World Series do better in baseball than maybe the regular season — it’s the stakes. I love still watching playoff baseball. I will be glued to the TV watching playoff baseball. But when you play 162 games, why am I going to watch a Tuesday night in July that’s Game 78 of (162)?”

Broussard said if MLB cuts its game to a 100-game schedule, he believes the popularity and urgency would be greater there.

[ House of Strauss ]

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