Too many games, too many players — how do you keep track?
While I was at the SABR 52 conference earlier this month (which was great BTW), in encounters with some of the members I heard a recurring theme that they did not watch much baseball anymore. My immediate thought was, that’s both awful and sad.
We SABR members are generally older and yes even a bit curmudgeonly when it comes to some of the changes that have occurred in baseball. I share a few of those curmudgeonly thoughts. Still, it disturbed me that there were HUGE baseball fans like me, who love the history and nuance of baseball, who did not watch much baseball anymore. Part of this is the fault of MLB. Maybe that’s the old guy in me but it’s also true. There are markets around the country in which no broadcast TV coverage is offered (Arizona, Colorado, and San Diego for example), and MLB Productions has needed to take over the coverage from Diamond Sports/Bally and there may or may not be games sold to local broadcast TV stations in those three markets. Even in the New York City area there occasional over the air broadcasts for the Mets and Yankees.
For fans that have been fans a long time, paying for access to watch their favorite teams may be prohibitively expensive. Not having any games on ‘free’ TV is a hard concept to fathom. MLB is aware of it, and changes are in the works, but for some fans who’ve been lost in the shift to baseball on pay TV, well, they might be gone for good. MLB needs to hurry up!
Many of the attendees at SABR 52 were born in the 1950s or later, and even a few in the 1940s. When I think about how baseball has changed so much since we/they were young fans there are reasons why it’s harder to be a knowledgeable fan of MLB today. Before expansion in 1961 there were eight teams in each league. Using a baseline roster of 25 players per team, this means fans had to know 200 players+ in their own league. With interleague play in the far future, as a fan of a team, there was not much reason to pay close attention to all the players in the ‘other’ league unless or until your team was going to play in the World Series. Keeping track of 200 or so players is feasible AND reasonable. You saw their names in the box scores and outside of our own team could sort of ‘know’ about most the 175 players in your league that weren’t on your favorite team. If you were 10 years old in 1960 and really becoming a baseball fan it was easy to keep track of everything.
By 1962, there were 20 MLB teams, 10 in each league. In 1969 that number increased to 24 teams when the Expos (Nationals), Padres, Royals, and Seattle Pilots (Brewers) were added. Now a fan had to keep track of 300 players in one league. You still could kind of ignore the other league if you wanted, since interleague play was still 28 years away. There have been three MLB expansions since, Toronto and Seattle in 1977, Colorado and Miami in 1993, and the most recent one in 1998 with Arizona and Tampa Bay joining the NL and AL respectively. This brings the total to today’s 30 MLB teams with further expansion to Nashville and possibly Portland, imminent.
Once interleague play began in 1997, fans finally began to have the chance to watch players from the other league play vs. their favorite team and even in their local ballpark. This is in comparison to the past where you could only see players from the other league in an All-star game hosted in your team’s city, or the World Series. Tickets for those games are not always easy to obtain.
Once the Diamondbacks and Rays were in the fold, there were then 750 players over the 30 rosters, more than three times the amount to keep track of! If you grew up paying attention to all the teams and players in your league it becomes part of your own personal baseball DNA.
Watching highlights has become a way to keep in touch with baseball. Younger fans are much more in tune with this than older ones. It’s fantastic to be able to watch all the great plays from the games of the day. Watching an entire game is also not the way many younger fans engage with baseball. Yet that makes these fans no less of a fan than the one who sits down in front of the TV with bowl of popcorn to watch all nine innings. At least when they can stand watching their team for all nine innings.
At SABR 52, one of the panel discussions on the future of baseball broadcasting included Dave St. Peter, President/CEO of the Minnesota Twins. St. Peter noted that MLB is aware of how the NBA has managed to have regular season games between teams be a featured event in part because the players on those teams carry so much fan interest. MLB needs more national stars and needs to promote those stars outside of the markets in which fans root for and watch/follow their home teams.
If my son and I were not doing a twice weekly podcast, I would not be as invested in knowing about as many MLB players as I am currently. It’s a lot to keep tabs on, even exhausting at times and I love it! But more casual fans need to be connected to the game, by being able to watch games when they want to for a price they can afford, and at the same time be ok with not knowing EVERY player. There are just so many players and so many games, and the amount of MLB players is only going to increase.
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About the Author: Mark Kolier along with his son Gordon co-hosts a baseball podcast called ‘Almost Cooperstown’. He also has written baseball-related articles that can be accessed on Medium.com and Substack.com.
