Sports —
I didn’t pay much attention to sports when I lived in England. They’re much harder to ignore now that I live in the US, especially in a competitive town like Boston where each of the national titles in basketball, American football, ice hockey and baseball have been won by a local team at least once since 2000.
Mad just won her lab’s March Madness bracket (this involves making predictions on the winners and losers of 63 college basketball games, and getting more of them correct than the other people who are competing with you) so we’ve watched a lot of basketball games recently, and I like to watch my countryman1 Andy Murray play tennis when I can.
I’ve also been trying to decide what my favorite sport is. Sometimes people ask you things like that here. I think they’re mainly asking to see whether I say something “outlandish” about soccer being better than American Football, or cricket being the zenith of physical competition between teams. I find that I enjoy watching basically all of them, especially with friends. My actual answer is long and complicated, so I’ll write it out here. I’m going to concentrate on popular sports in the US, since that’s where I live now.
Basketball
As Mako pointed out to me, it’s rarely worth tuning in to a basketball game before the last five to ten minutes. A 10-15 point deficit is by no means insurmountable with ten minutes left to play, and teams are rarely more than 20 points ahead by then. You generally won’t have missed the decisive portion of the game if you wait until the last quarter to start watching, which makes watching the first three quarters feel unsatisfying somehow.
The NBA tries to make the league more competitive between teams by having a draft where the teams that didn’t make the playoffs in the previous season get the first choice of upcoming college players in the new season; it also has a salary cap and luxury tax. I like these ideas in principle, but they don’t seem to be working in practice yet: the NBA has teams that repeat championship wins more often than the NFL, showing that these rules are not working to break up domination by a few teams.
Morale seems to be a particularly visible aspect of basketball given the frequent scoring — one team going on a 10-0 run is common, often with the other team coming back with a reversed run later, and that’s satisfying to watch.
Basketball seems especially prone to having games be decided by controversial referee decisions, most of which can not be appealed or corrected.
Baseball
Baseball has no salary cap, and has the far worse equivalent of a luxury tax which sends money to the MLB organization itself when a team pays over a salary limit. This does not bother teams like the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox, which continue to spend ridiculous amounts on players undeterred. The last game of the 2011 season, between the Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, was between a team with a $156M payroll and a team with a $37M payroll2. Why is that supposed to be fun or fair to watch? I guess it could be fun if you always cheer for the team that is vastly outperforming its payroll (as Tampa Bay did against Boston that night!), but otherwise I don’t see the point.
As for Mako’s decisive-moment metric, baseball almost has the inverse problem to basketball — a bases-loaded homer in the 3rd inning (for example) can often decide the game right there, so you have to start watching at the beginning to be confident of not missing a decisive play. The games are pretty long too. I think there’s a middle ground between early-decisiveness and last-minute-decisiveness that I prefer instead.
American (NFL) Football
I like that the NFL has a direct salary cap, so no team can spend many times more on players than another team as they do in baseball. I also like the amazing speed, agility and split-second instincts that NFL players exhibit. The decisiveness seems about right. The system for appealing rulings and referring to instant replays works well.
But I hate that the NFL has a problem with chronic traumatic encephalopathy that it is basically doing nothing about. Many veteran players are suffering from this form of early-onset dementia. This exposé by GQ in 2009 (GQ, really?!) is completely damning, and I think it should be required reading for anyone who watches NFL football. There’s also Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker directly comparing American football to dogfighting, which seems sound to me.
But wait, you say! This season the NFL instituted new rules on what type of hits are allowed. These rules entirely miss the point — as you’ll read in the GQ article, professional footballers take the equivalent of multiple car crashes of sub-concussion every game, and none of the plays that cause these sub-concussions were illegal before the new rules or are illegal after them. The new “devastating tackle” rule bans tackles that look gruesome, while leaving alone the hits that are known to cause permanent brain injury when repeated as they are on almost every play. It’s a cover up, and the player-safety equivalent of security theater.
We also don’t get to see NFL teams practice, yet the HITS data referred to by the GQ article suggests that practices contain many sub-concussions too, and can be as damaging as the games themselves. If the players spend 80% of their time practicing and 20% playing in season games, then practice could be responsible for 80% of the brain injuries due to concussion they get, and we don’t even see it happening.
My preferred solution is to remove helmets altogether, as rugby does. Faced with the option of colliding heads at 100 gs of force but without a helmet, it seems likely that players would just decide not to do something so ridiculous with their heads.
Ice Hockey
I’m not at all expert in ice hockey, but it seems to me that it has the same safety problems as football, plus legalized and celebrated fighting between players. Gross.
Tennis
It’s nice to have an individual sport as well as team ones. Psychology and willpower often seem to become the dominant factor in who wins a game, and that’s exciting to watch. I guess it ties back into my experience playing Chess and Go, and individual tennis might be my favorite sport for that reason alone.
At first glance it seems like tennis has the same decisiveness problems as baseball, with it being hard to come back from an early deficit, but it doesn’t really. Tennis doesn’t keep an absolute cumulative score in the same way as baseball — you can lose the first set in a 1-6 blowout and win the second set 7-6, and then everything’s all square again even though you only won 8 games and your opponent won 12. The baseball equivalent would be something like if you could make up for your opponent’s third-inning bases-loaded homer with a well-timed single run afterwards, and that would certainly keep the games closer.
Tennis refereeing decisions can be appealed with a challenge system that works well.
Soccer
Has the “beginning of the game can decide the match” problem of baseball. Clubs refuse to institute a salary cap, leading to the same kind of disparity that baseball has between teams — in 2008, the median Premier League total team salary was $44M/year, yet Chelsea spent3 $172M/year!
Worse, continuing to refuse to use instant replay to correct poor referee decisions (in 2012!) is basically unforgivable, and caused significant international dispute during the last World Cup. Peter Singer wrote an article about the ethics of cheating in football that I agree with wholeheartedly; I don’t think soccer players make good role models under the current rules (with the possible exception of Lionel Messi’s refusal to flop).
Singer looks for an instance of overtly ethical play in soccer, but even the one example he manages to find is not a good one. He mentions Robbie Fowler in 1997 being awarded a penalty which he tries to decline, but the referee insists that he take it. Singer says that Fowler takes the penalty “in a manner that enables the goalkeeper to save it”, but that’s not what happens — the keeper does get a hand to the shot, but then it spills back out and one of Fowler’s teammates puts in the rebound for a goal. If Fowler actually wanted to decline the penalty, he could have simply not aimed it at the inside of the goal. Fowler says that he was not intending to miss, and was playing with acceptance of the referee’s decision even though he didn’t agree with it.
Okay, so I have complaints and likes about every sport. How do I decide which one is my favorite? In the true spirit of utilitarianism, I have a nerdy idea about comparing sports against each other using the axes I care about directly: the satisfyingness of Mako’s decisive moment‘s timing, the long term safety of the players, the impact of referee decisions on the outcome and the impact that money has on the strength of each team; but I’ll break this post up here and wait until my next post to detail my calculation. Of course, these variables might be much more important to me than to you. What do you think? Are there more variables that you’d add for consideration? How does your favorite sport stack up in these metrics? Do you want to set me straight on ice hockey?
1: No, I’m not trying to claim that Andy Murray is English like me; he is Scottish. But apparently the United Kingdom is a country that consists of countries, even though that makes no sense, so he’s still my countryman.
2: Figures are from http://baseballplayersalaries.com/.
3: Stats from http://www.trophy4toon.co.uk/salaries.html. I can’t find total salary data that’s newer than 2008.
No Rugby Union in the states?
The NBA has deep financial problems that prevent it from having a fully competitive league, with no easy way to fix them. You won’t see a change to the basic structure anytime soon.
While spending money does help in baseball considerably, it’s hardly a guarantee of winning or even a championship. Instituting a salary cap wouldn’t make non-competitive teams more competitive.
Ice hockey does have concussion problems but they’re not as severe as the NFL since there’s generally less risk of head contact. They also do a better job of treating players after head injuries, though arguably not enough. Plenty of people want a total fighting ban, but there’s been considerable pushback on the part of “enforcers” (players selected for their ability to fight); a complete ban might be viable in the next decade or so. Regardless of your views on fighting generally, it’s not the most dangerous part of a professional hockey game. Getting hit by a puck in the head or an illegal check is far, far worse. Compared to a decade ago, most fights these days are pretty “sissy” in comparison.
A brief defense of hockey. 🙂
1. The safety ills are not the same as football. Modern football is basically designed to destroy the brains of the majority of its players. While hockey collisions can also be violent, and there are still too many concussions in the sport, they are still the exception rather than the rule — and the typical NHL player goes on to live a much fuller and healthier life than his NFL counterpart.
2. The refs are terrible, but that’s largely because it’s an impossibly fast game — way faster than any other sport, by a wide margin. A hockey player in full stride can reach upwards of 30mph. A slap shot can go 100mph. The best you can hope for is that the refs get it wrong equally. Video goal reviews help greatly.
3. The speed of the game, and the fact that they basically carry clubs in their hands and knives on their feet, makes for an interesting culture around fighting and mutual respect. It’s related to the referee’s fundamental inability to see every infraction that occurs; it is therefore accepted that players sometimes need to hold other players accountable directly. The most reviled player in hockey is not the guy who fights, but the guy who takes cheap shots and then refuses to fight when he’s called to account. Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, but hockey players almost unanimously agree that fighting has a place in the game.
If you don’t like fighting, you should watch some college hockey, in which fighting is grounds for immediate ejection. Also, you’ve got several of the best programs in college hockey right in your neighborhood. Get tickets to the Beanpot next year.
4. There’s both a salary ceiling and a salary floor. It’s a game that depends on team chemistry maybe more than any other. Championships are routinely won by teams with middle-of-the-road budgets.
5. The decisive moments in hockey are unlike any other. Your team is down a goal with a minute to go, you get the puck down at the other end of the ice, your goalie sprints to the bench so that the extra attacker can skate on — incredible.
Thanks, hockey people! I admit to being purposefully incendiary, and appreciate the corrections.
> The safety ills are not the same as football.
Have you seen this? It doesn’t seem to leave much of a difference between hockey and football, but it also isn’t comparing rates directly.
I am mostly the same, like all these sports. One other criteria I use is how good the game is on the radio (which somewhat mitigates the decisive moment problem), and there baseball wins hands down. I will even listen to the game on the radio when it is on TV, because then I can program on the computer or whatever and pay attention when the announcer starts to get excited!
You can’t determine how a moment in baseball is decisive until the game is over. People get burned by this all the time.
Example 1: [2007 Mother’s Day](http://scores.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=270513102): the weather was lovely, yet fans were leaving after the 8th inning.
Example 2: [2005 NLCS Game 5](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_National_League_Championship_Series#Game_5)
. When the outcome looked inevitable, the turning point of the game was announced on TV as the Astros’ go-ahead HR, prior to the Cards coming back to win.
Hi,
> You can’t determine how a moment in baseball is decisive until the game is over. People get burned by this all the time.
I agree, but I’m not trying to measure when to stop watching. I’m trying to measure how enjoyable I’ll feel the game was after I get to the end.
If I started watching in the fourth inning and the lead doesn’t change because I’ve already missed (what turns out to be) the decision point of the game, I’ll feel kinda bummed. That’s much less likely to happen in basketball or American football, so I describe those sports as being more fun to watch, for the case of that particular variable.
(Even if I did watch the whole baseball game from the start, I think I’d still feel less than fully satisfied if there weren’t any lead changes after the first few minutes of a several-hour game; it feels like a waste of the rest of the time watching to me.)
I totally understand that these are all very personal metrics, though. I’m curious to hear what everyone else’s are. 🙂
I think you misrepresent this for football (no, I don’t call it soccer), too.
While seeing the goals happen is an exciting part of the game, a lot of the enjoyment – at least for me – comes from watching my team struggle to come back from or defend a 1-goal difference for 30 minutes while the clock is ticking down.
This is also why I enjoy the happenings in football in the last few years where teams started to play more and more offensive. You don’t get more goals but you get a lot more chances for goalshots.
And last but not least: I mostly watch esports these days, Starcraft and DotA2 to be precise. I consider it quite a bit more fun than watching real sports. Maybe that’s because I play those games and because of that have quite a bit more knowledge about details. But maybe it’s also because they are more enjoyable. After all, they are a very different kind of thing to regular sports.
Jeff Huang has a paper on that, if you want to read up on the differences.
> I think you misrepresent this for football (no, I don’t call it soccer), too.
I don’t think I have misrepresented anything. I’m saying that if an hour goes by without any points being scored or lead changes, that’s probably boring to me. Someone else, perhaps you, might find exactly the same thing exciting. Someone else might dislike the sport altogether.
> And last but not least: I mostly watch esports these days
Sounds interesting. I like watching Go games online, especially against the computer Zen19, but I didn’t mention it here because my context was the sports that the people I live near are watching.
>Even if I did watch the whole baseball game from the start, I think I’d still feel less than fully satisfied if there weren’t any lead changes after the first few minutes of a several-hour game; it feels like a waste of the rest of the time watching to me.
I guess we appreciate different things, because watching my team pitch a no-hitter with no lead changes would be at the top of my list of things to see.
Also you say that tennis does not accumulate score like baseball does because you can win sets with a lopsided number of games. But in baseball, you can in fact allow 20 more baserunners than your opponent and still have the same number of runs.
FWIW, the number of full pad practices in the NFL (which means full contact) is very small now. Each team as of the start of the 2011 season is only allowed 14 full pad practices for the whole season.
Totally agree about NBA — the total irrelevance of the game up until the last few minutes (I would say much less than 10 minutes) is why I don’t watch. Also it’s the sport whose rules bother me the most.Individual plays are awesome, I just don’t like the game.
I love hockey and I find it very interesting that it has (probably?) the oldest professional athletes.I’m a little bothered by the fighting, but I’m not sure I fundamentally object to the idea of fighting for sport (boxing, MMA, etc) and I wonder what my (or anyone’s) standards there actually are.
Thoughts! I have ’em.
1) It’s interesting to see you go about this so intellectually, when my own affections for various sports are mostly determined by nostalgia and empathy – that is, I mostly like the sports I played and watched with my family as a kid. I enjoy watching baseball and basketball because I have a more intuitive sense of how difficult the hard plays are and how frustrating the mistakes are. And, you know, I like the Yankees because I was raised liking the Yankees, the same way I was raised celebrating Passover and watching Dr Who. 🙂
2) To the extent which I do have rational opinions about which sports are better, I tend to like sports which have more gender equality. I’ll watch women’s tennis or soccer where I wouldn’t watch men’s. (I got *so* into the 1996 women’s world cup.) It saddens me to no end that baseball, which I otherwise adore, has banned women ever since 1952. On this note, I’m super curious about roller derby, which is women-dominated so far – let me know if you want to go see a Boston area derby match sometime.
3) You say:
>(Even if I did watch the whole baseball game from the start, I think I’d still feel less than fully satisfied if there weren’t any lead changes after the first few minutes of a several-hour game; it feels like a waste of the rest of the time watching to me.)
The key for me is to always be doing something else at the same time. If I’m at the ballpark, I bring a friend who I know can sustain an interesting three hour conversation punctuated by brief bursts of tension. If I’m at home, I do work or read the newspaper or something else that I can give half my attention to. This is maybe not the ideal way to watch a game – it certainly is not all in, all the time – but I think the different, more relaxed rhythm of baseball as compared to other sports can be a pro as well as a con.
Thanks for the thoughts!
> It’s interesting to see you go about this so intellectually, when my own affections for various sports are mostly determined by nostalgia and empathy – that is, I mostly like the sports I played and watched with my family as a kid.
Yep, it’s because I moved to the US after already having finished childhood and college, so I don’t have any emotional ties to the US sports. I do have a childhood tie to soccer — my dad would take me to games, I played it at school, watched it on TV, collected trading cards of English players when I was young..
.. yet I was pretty negative about soccer in the post. It seems spoiled by cheating and dishonesty to me far more than the other sports. Maybe I can justify disliking my childhood sport now by arguing that the dishonesty and flopping/diving weren’t always as bad as they are lately. 🙂
Speaking of cheating and dishonesty, someone on google+ mentioned that they like to watch cycling, and that prompted me to add a “likelihood that the players are all on drugs” metric to the list. I don’t have a strong feeling about which of the sports I mentioned involve illegal drugs more than the others; baseball’s in the news a lot, but maybe steroid use is common in all of them? (Except perhaps tennis?)
So I’d imagine that most sports have problems with steroids, but I don’t know much about them – I know with baseball they only even started testing for steroids back in 2002. My guess is it’s something to do with how fanatic the baseball community is about its statistics. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the renewed interest in steroids happened around the time of the big home run races of 1998 and 2001 where McGwire and Bonds just shattered the single season record set by Maris in 1961 (who had beaten by just 1 home run the record set by Babe Ruth over 30 years before.) People get annoyed by that. I was annoyed by that, because they were so bulked up and it just didn’t seem natural. (And McGwire, at least, has since admitted to using steroids.)
Your post has reminded me of all my conflicting feelings about sports in general and baseball in particular – I wrote a post about it over a year ago, it’s here if you’re interested.
Chris and I discussed this in person some, I’m transcribing here. I suggested there be an ‘economic power of the player’ metric — the reason the NFL achieves team parity (and has a hard salary cap) is that the NFL player’s association has very little power. It disturbs me to watch athletes underpaid (relative to market value) to ruin their bodies.
We also hashed through player longevity (you’re done by 16 in gymnastics) and physical toll (non-pitcher baseball players leave the game with few physical after-effects).
Some of these metrics can be quantified — fangraphs.com has a real-time graph of how much each particular outcome ‘matters’ to a baseball game, for instance. You can also hope to quantify referees’ effects on the games (how much would I gain by bribing a tennis line judge to refrain from calling my balls out?) and “competitiveness” of the league. I’m not sure it makes sense to include the financial aspect explicitly in the “competitiveness” measure — counting repeat champions ought to be enough. However, there’s also a “random variability” metric which can be quantified — how much does the outcome of a particular game/match depend on pure chance, rather than the skill differences between teams? Baseball has something like a 3-run differential due to pure luck — which is why playoffs are 7-game series (and in fact should properly be 9). Football has random variation, too, but can only do single elimination playoffs due to the physical toll of the game, which somewhat cheapens any particular playoff win/loss. Individual tennis games are highly random, but are repeated enough to make match results meaningful — but are they meaningful enough? In any case, you ought to be able to quantify this across sports.
NFL parity is largely because of revenue sharing.
Anyway, player economic disempowerment doesn’t come from league rules in the end — it comes from the league being granted permitted monopoly status by the federal government. This is also the case for other professional sports. At any given moment, specific league rules may be better or worse for players in different sports, but the fundamental problem is the same across all of them. A worker in the system has no ability to go to a competing company.
But anyway, at the professional level in the NFL, we’re talking about exploitation of millionaires by other millionaires, which smells a little fishy to me no matter what. The higher priority place to fix economic exploitation is prior to the pro levels — like in college where they are paid nothing beyond a scholarship while earning millions for others.
Monopoly status doesn’t mean that players can’t strike. Baseball, football, and the NBA player’s unions have staged strikes. If anything, monopoly status increases the power of the strike — there is no professional football played anywhere in the US if the NFL player’s union strikes. So I’m not convinced by your argument that player disempowerment is solely caused by the monopoly grant. Player power differs greatly between sports, and thus is a valid basis for cross-sport comparison.
Re: “Exploitation of millionaires”: Although NBA rookies get paid between $800,000 and $4.2 million, NFL rookies get only $375,000, for much greater physical hazard. The NHL league minimum is $525,000 for 2011-2011, and the MLB minimum is $390,000. The MLB minimum is comparable to the NFL — but the MLB rookie has much less risk of permanent trauma. These differences reflect differing amounts of player empowerment.
Minor leagues are also professional leagues. Minor league baseball players get paid $1,100/month for half a year ($6,000/season). According to a 2007 report by National Public Radio, the average NBA D-League salary ranges from $12,000 to $24,000 a season. NFL practice squad players, who earn $5,700/week without benefits ($97,000/season), although there is no guarantee of being hired for all 17 weeks of the season. Again, these differences illustrate differences between player (dis)empowerment in the sports, although the NFL comes off well this time since only the NFL practice squad players are unionized. (Lower-level NFL players are comparatively more empowered.)
Maximum salaries are also informative. The NBA maximum is capped at $20 million for 2012, although Kobe Bryant slips in through a loophole to earn $25 million. The highest paid NFL player is Tom Brady at $18 million/year. The NHL cap for 2012 is $7.8 million, although Alexander Ovechkin is apparently earning $9,538,462. The maximum MLB salary in 2011 was for Alex Rodriguez: $32 million. The NFL maximum is 56% of the MLB maximum despite greater physical danger.
The average NBA salary in 2010–11 was $5.356 million, highest among professional sports, mitigated somewhat by the small 15-person roster. The average MLB salary in 2011 was $3.1 million. The average NHL salary is $2.4 million. The average NFL player salary: $1.9 million (median salary is only $770,000). Again, NFL players are economically disempowered compared to their compatriots in other sports.
Other interesting facts: the average NFL career length is only 3.5 years, and there were 352 players on injured reserve in 2010. The average MLB career length was 5.6 years in 2007. I couldn’t find authoritative statistics for the NBA: one site indicated that the average career was just over 6 seasons in 2010; Time magazine said it was 4.82 seasons in 1999. NHL careers seem to average 5-6 seasons.
Using this data we can compare total career earnings for an average player in each sport. The average NBA player earns $25.8 – 32.1 million over the course of their career (depending on whose value of average career length you use). The average MLB player earns $17.3 million over their career. The average NHL player earns $12-14.4 million in a career. The average NFL player earns only $6.6 million over the course of their career. Again, the NFL player is getting the short end of the stick by far!
Only MLB has an actual legal monopoly in the US. The rest are de facto monopolies. It’s a natural trend for sports, in the US anyway. It’s largely due to television, also due to the fact that fans want to see their favorite teams compete (which means leagues slowly merge together). The reality of the matter is that monopolies for professional sports are probably inevitable in the USA. Moreover, Congress and the public show little interest in breaking them up. I think it’s a framework you simply have to work within; there won’t ever be European-style soccer leagues here for professional sports. Some leagues couldn’t sustain it (NFL, NBA, NHL, ironically the MLS). There’s also serious limits on how many teams most cities can support.
The monopolies don’t really disempower the actual stars in a league. One of the NBA’s major problems is that almost everyone is paid too much; the NHL had a similar problem not too long ago. All of the leagues are unionized and the player’s unions in the NFL and MLB hold considerable power (since lockouts hurts owners more than the players). Unfortunately the unions don’t always act in the long term interests of the players, but that is as much the conscious decision of the players as it is the nature of the system. There’s also, in some unions, problems with unequal representation for superstars vs. the other players (the NBA in particular is pretty biased).
I agree the rules for college players are way worse, way more nonsensical, and way more exploitative.
Interestingly, one solution to improve competitiveness would be to break up the *regional* monopolies various teams hold. The Yankees and the Mets both have vetos over any new expansion teams in the New York metropolitan area. If this were abolished, one might expect that market to be able to support, say, 2 more baseball teams. Splitting up the lucrative revenue of the NYC area among four teams instead of two ought to reduce the current financial advantage of the Yankees.
More information in a [great story from slate.com about the A’s proposed relocation](http://goo.gl/W4BQK).
On hockey – I think it’s mostly been covered above. I don’t actually know that there have been any decent studies that would allow you to draw solid conclusions about whether it’s better or worse than football, but I’d tend to side with Greg in assuming that hockey is likely better, because it’s not a game _designed around_ dangerous hits to the head, and they certainly seem much more rare than in football (where, as you correctly note, they happen to probably at least four players on every single down).
I’d also say that the _response_ of the NHL to recent concerns about head injuries has been a lot better than that of the NFL; they’ve tweaked the rules in several ways and started (from this season) enforcing much harsher penalties for dangerous hits. It’s also interesting to note that there’s a pretty strong consensus of fans, coaches and players behind this; there’s a few dinosaurs lining up behind ‘old school hockey’ where you could blindside people at center ice with relative impunity, but they’re a distinct minority. There seems to be a pretty solid consensus in favour of making the game safer, which is a good thing.
Greg’s also right that the fighting, especially in modern day hockey, is usually something of a joke. This is mostly for the fairly simple reason that it’s intrinsically difficult to swing an effect punch on ice skates. The worst injuries you see in fights almost always result from one of the combatants tripping and landing directly on their head; the actual _fighting_ usually results in little besides the odd bloody nose. I’d be totally happy to see fighting gone from hockey entirely, to be honest. It’s a sideshow, and it’s not necessary in the days of sixteen video angles of everything. It did serve a purpose decades ago with no TV and fewer officials, I think, as Greg describes, but these days, it’s pretty much a hangover that could be got rid of with no bad effects on the game.
I think baseball is a game that has to be approached much like cricket. It’s pretty tough to just sit down and watch a full game of baseball straight through on TV without doing anything else, unless it happens to be a _really_ good game. It works much, much better live than it does on TV; there’s a whole atmosphere to a ballgame that you don’t get from the TV, and this is true in the same way as it’s true of a good traditional cricket match. It’s as much about sitting outside with beer and snacks, heckling the officials, and chatting as it is about actually watching the game. On TV, I usually leave baseball on in the background while I do something else, watch a few innings when there’s a particular player I want to watch (usually a pitcher), or just watch the playoffs. The most fun I have with baseball, actually, is watching the local minor league team from ten feet behind home plate. If you’ve never been to a minor league game, try it.
All of this is moot, however, as the most thrilling and interesting game on television is, indisputably, poker. Nothing else is in the race. 🙂