Baseball kinda rules, nice to see it’s doing well. Watching Blessed Heroic Venezuela beat Cursed Satanic USA in the world baseball classic was an all-time great moment.
Did the NBA ever overtake MLB in terms of revenue and viewership? I thought MLB was the second largest sports league in the world.
I don’t know about the actual numbers but there was talk several years ago that baseball was becoming a “regional sport” whereas the NFL and NBA were “national sports” where people watched more games than just their home team on their regional sports network. The reduction in game times and other rule changes seem to have reversed the trend in certain ways. The NBA still makes almost double the revenue of baseball on a per-game basis.
I usually root against dynastic champions, but the Dodgers have been must see TV for the last two years. Game 7 of last year’s World Series was the greatest playoff game I have ever seen in any sport. And it is fun witnessing a once in a lifetime talent like Ohtani breaking all sorts of century-old records.
The constant betting ads have really turned me off from watching most sports. It has been especially hard to watch my NBA team the last few years because of tanking.
Seeing the MLB change its rules to appeal to a wider audience has been interesting. Things like the pitch clock and ABS system have certainly made for a more streamlined game, but a lot of die-hard baseball fans that I know don’t like them because they see it as sanding down a sport that they fell in love with for being slower and having esoteric, unwritten rules (laudatory).
Nothing beats watching a baseball game in person on a summer evening though.
nba regular season product is dog shit. the media and fans think this has something to do with tanking, but really, the entirety of the schedule is boring and uninteresting, hence the fact that the same tired tanking discourse gets trotted out – there’s literally nothing else interesting to talk about, going into the playoffs, except how to turn the nobs on some spreadsheet, which can categorically never remove the mismatched incentives.
obviously the league would never implement radical fixes (eliminate corruption (balmer under mining the salary cap; lottery rigging; ban gambling endorsements; get rid of all the old refs and making refing assignments random/transparent); institute relegation and create a bifurcated league), but you could do simple things: eliminate replay except for facially egregious calls, cut the number of games down to 62, eliminate half the play-off teams, eliminate the goofus cup, institute foul rules which are simple to ref and which don’t just benefit the ball carrier.
but silver will never do that, and will happily run the league into the ground as some vertically integrated gambling parlor.
also, more importantly, and super actionable: they need to give Jokic two more MVPs, Harden two more MVPs, kick Kawhi out, kick Tatum out (too boring), eliminate all the people named Jalen, and make the rosters the same as featured in 2k13 – i’m not trying to learn more 18 y/o names.
Mlb sucks tho
can not tolerate watching baseball if they put the stupid pitch clock on the screen. constant stress from seeing the timer
Dunno. I find the pros at that level boring, especially on TV. They’re worked too hard and long to put much into the games until the key ones and tournaments.
College basketball is great.
Baseball is only great if you go in person. Being at the park with friends for a game can be magical.
