The Old Ball Game

The lockout ended and the crisis averted, Major League Baseball is back, and I can stop inserting qualifiers like "if and when the season starts" into stories about changes to the announcing crews. The games will be played, and old guys can breathe a sigh of relief.

Old guys, of course, still love baseball. Young fans, not so much. The game is slow, some of the biggest stars are charisma-free, there are so many games in a season that most aren't special, and we may have lost the ability to appreciate things that unfold at their own, deliberate pace. If you grew up with video games, you want noise, speed, color.

Baseball ain't that. Football can do that when it's on TV, where you don't feel how truly slow it is like you do in person, where you don't get camera angles and sideline reports and commercials to mask the long dead spots. Basketball has the celebrity and the pace and the off-the-court soap opera/reality TV content to keep up. Baseball? It's largely the same as it was when Great Grandpa was around, except for the DH and helmets and a few other changes. Games go on forever.

And it's a radio sport. You hear this from us old guys all the time: TV's fine, but there's nothing like listening to a game on a summer night, the play-by-play wafting through the warm air while you crack open a can of Schlitz on the patio out back. I admit it, I have those thoughts, growing up listening to the Phillies, Mets, Yankees, Orioles, and Red Sox on AM radio, interrupted by the crackle of distant lightning, the voices of legendary sportscasters narrating the drama with the sound of the crowd as a backdrop... yeah, we get all misty about that. And living in L.A. for the past couple of decades gave me the treat of hearing Vin Scully, the best ever.

Maybe that's the problem for baseball, intertwined with the problem for radio. The nostalgia old guys have for baseball is the same as the nostalgia for the way radio used to be, the warm connection between listener and content. It's been decades since people have grown up with that. If you're older, you didn't grow up with the same choices and the same stimulus and the same cultural touchstones and the same taste. It's not that one is better than the other, it's that what's the pinnacle of entertainment for one generation is outdated and unknown to another. People discussing comedy will say "funny is funny," but that's not always true; what made audiences laugh in 1945, or 1960, or 1980 can come off as corny or cringe today. What made great radio in those years probably doesn't resonate to someone in their 20s or 30s. Things changed, and baseball, and radio, probably didn't change enough to keep up.

So I'm happy that baseball is back, and, certainly, with deals like the Apple TV+ contract, they'll stay in business for a long, long time, but it'll likely never be what it was. And what WILL be popular with future generations may be basketball or football or soccer, or it might be Esports, or it might not be sports at all. Same for radio; it'll be around, but it's not what it once was, and whether it's supplanted by podcasting or streaming or TikTok or YouTube or Amp or something else that hasn't even been invented yet, it'll be a different world.

That's okay. There's room for everything. Even if the glory days are over, we can appreciate things for what they are as well as what they used to be. Even if someone in their teens would rather watch Twitch than baseball, or listen to Spotify than radio, there's still a place for baseball and for radio. More than ever, things in our culture don't have to be for everybody. They can be for those who, you know, LIKE them. And there are more things out there to like. I'd say that, on balance, that's a good thing, unless you're an investor looking for maximum growth.

Now, I have to figure out a way to get some free or cheap tickets to the Marlins-Phillies series in April. That shouldn't be too hard, should it?

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Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon