Monday night, I took my 13-year-old son to the Rockies-Padres game at Coors Field. One of the first thoughts I had after settling into our seats, 31 rows back of home plate: Where are the other kids my son’s age?
There was more than a touch of gray among the fans around us. A lot of husbands and wives into what appeared their fifth, sixth and seventh decades. Hey, no ageism here – I felt right at home at least.
But I couldn’t help but think: What’s going to happen to our national pastime when all us older folk, you know, move on at some point? After some Googling around on the subject, it appears this is a big-time, worrisome topic to big-league baseball.
And, by the bottom of the third inning, it didn’t take Google to get a sense of the trouble baseball is in with the younger generations. By that point, the game was more than an hour old already: This baseball game, it was clear, was no match against the lure of the smartphone, where texts from friends, Pokemon creatures and Facebook memes laid in wait for my son’s thumb-swiping consumption.
Part of baseball’s charm to my generation and the ones before was precisely its leisurely pace. When I was a kid, we only had six or seven channels, none of which were solely devoted to just sports. There was no Internet and no smartphones.
When Red Sox games came on TV when I was a kid, I didn’t want them to end. It was the only televised sports entertainment on for a summer’s night. The game being over meant it was nearing time for the test pattern to take over the channel for the rest of the night. No more Fred Lynn and Carlton Fisk and Jim Rice on the 13-inch black and white TV. There were no replays of the game available on the same channel like there are today, no long postgame studio shows with highlights and discussion by experts on every turning point in the game.
My son is not a big sports fan. While I watched every second of any sports event on TV or radio when I was his age, he’s just more into other things. He just has so many more entertainment options. But he has heard of LeBron James and Steph Curry and Von Miller and Tom Brady and Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin.
I asked him tonight to name one “big-name” big-league player, currently active. He actually did name one: Mookie Betts of the Red Sox. Of course, this came after he recently spent two weeks back East with his grandparents, where most every night they watch the Red Sox on TV.
Getting back to the aforementioned Googling around on baseball’s aging demographics: According to recent Nielsen ratings, 50 percent of baseball’s typical television viewer is 55 or older. While the NBA’s average viewer is 37, baseball’s is 53. According to a story in MarketWatch, the number of kids between 7 and 17 playing baseball decreased a startling 41 percent from 2002-13 (9 million to 5.3 million). ESPN recently announced cutbacks to its baseball programming and overall commitment to covering the sport.
While the other major sports seem to be trying to get faster in an aspects, baseball seems to be trying to get even slower. It’s always been prone to longer games, of course, because there is no time clock. But now there are lengthy video reviews on contested calls and ever-increasing frequencies of managers changing pitchers and seemingly increasing lengths of batters going through their habitual gyrations before stepping into the box.
Monday’s game between the Rockies and San Diego Padres clocked in at three hours, 23 minutes. Some other times of games Monday that didn’t need extra innings, some not even the bottom of the ninth: 3:15 (Brewers-Pirates), 3:20 (Cardinals-Mets), 3:18 (Blue Jays-Red Sox), 3:02 (Yankees-Twins) and 3:29 (Tigers-Royals).
That’s just too long, even for an old guy like me.
As much as I didn’t want baseball games to end when I was a kid, I definitely remember many that finished in two hours or less. Asking a kid today to sit through an extra 60-90 minutes of a nine-inning game, with a smartphone in their hand?
Forget it.
By the fourth inning, my son had seen enough. He wanted to go. As much as I tried to put up an argument with him, about how not everything in life has to happen in an instant, about how sometimes “good things take time”, about the sport’s lyrical past and all that old George Will stuff, it went in one ear and right out the other.
“I want to get home to see “American Ninja Warrior” dad,” he said.
Forget three strikes. We were only at one before we were out at the old ball game.
