The idea seemed cut-and-dried: ask the kids how much they followed baseball and through what media outlets – new or old – they tracked our oldest pro sport.
But when they raised their hands, then opened their mouths to explain, both broken-down ink-stained wretch and raw rookies got yet another journalism lesson. You never know what kind of story you’ll get when you ask the right question at the right time.
This entry in this column’s saga germinated the other day at the sportswriting class of Brooklyn native Howie (Disco Schloss) Schlossberg at Columbia College in downtown Chicago. Twice a year, Disco Schloss (you should see his Afro on his 1970s-vintage ID he still carries) asks me to talk about the business to his students.
This time, I decided to turn the tables and do a column on young folks’ sports and media interests, given a captive audience that obviously was concerned with both institutions.
What I found out should worry Bud Selig and his 2015 successor.
I figured I’d get a majority of a show of hands admitting a daily interest in baseball and then an exploration of how they follow the game in an era of both diminishing old-media coverage and overall media access to teams. Instead, I received a jolt to the senses when six of the eight students, ages 19 to 22, said they do not really follow baseball regularly.
Admittedly, eight students — attendance was down from the normal class turnout, angering Disco Schloss – is hardly a scientific survey. Just a tiny sample size. Still, the lack of pull by baseball to kids who’d logically follow it regularly links to coinciding trends such as dramatically diminished attention spans by the same age group.
I started clockwise around the classroom table. Gender-wise, the group was evenly split: four women and men apiece. The assemblage was ethnically diverse.
Mentions of long games, long seasons, behind-the-times marketing, and losing teams came up in my journey.
“I played softball all my life and I watched my brother play baseball,” said Gina Venetico, who lives a few blocks away from me in Morton Grove, Ill. “I just have more fun playing it than watching it. I’ll never go out of my way to look up what’s going on with the Cubs, even though I identify as a Cubs fan and go to an occasional game.”
OK, we have one participant rather than a spectator. Now we wandered into the football stronghold of the class. First stop was Ben Davidson – a legendary football name, but not one and the same as the all-time irascible Oakland Raider. This chap hailed from Kansas City.
“I played baseball growing up, and it turned into just soccer as my main interest,” said the littler Davidson. “I follow soccer every day. There was a period last season when I was checking the Royals every day.”
But despite father Gregg Davidson taking his son once or twice a month to his split season tickets at Royals games, the passion for the game never stuck. Endless seasons of Royals’ bottom-feeding in the American League Central extinguished that chance. “I’d day that’s a fair assessment,” Davidson said. The more competitive Chiefs got the better chunk of his loyalty.
Such an opinion syncs with a recent Harris poll on sports’ popularity. The NFL was respondents’ favorite with 35 percent compared to 14 percent for baseball, 11 percent for college football, 7 percent for auto racing, 6 percent for pro basketball (down from 13 percent in 1998), and 5 percent for pro hockey.
An even stranger disconnect from baseball came from Colin Petersen, a New Hampshire native who grew up an hour from Boston in the heart of Red Sox Nation. The Old Towne Team won their first neurosis-busting World Series in 2004 when Petersen was in middle school. Admittedly, Petersen and his family were not native New Englanders, yet Red Sox euphoria was not catching at all.
“There’s just something very old about baseball,” he said. “I still feel they run the league like it’s 20 or 30 years ago. I love football – it’s my big sport. I like the Browns. My dad is from Cleveland. The long season really hurts them. In football, it’s their biggest benefit. Every single one of their 16 games really matters. The Vikings-Giants game – they had one win between them – got a better rating than the Cardinals-Red Sox World Series game.
“Basketball is a more entertaining sport. It’s a more athletic sport. Soccer has a more global vision. I really don’t see where baseball fits in. My best memory of baseball games is going to a Cubs game last summer, sneaking a glass of whiskey in, and doing some day-drinking at Wrigley.”
At the other end of the table was Evan Bell of Chicago, the only African-American of the group.
“I am a baseball fan,” said Bell. “Do I watch it more than basketball or football? Probably not. The season is kind of really long. I think 100 games would do better for them to market toward our generation, the newer generation. It’s not because we have a shorter attention span. You guys (Baby Boomers) had all the star power back in the day. We don’t have any star power.”
“Kids are playing basketball and football more because you need 18 players (in baseball) instead of four, five, or six. That is true. But what baseball can do is not make everything so bad. The Hall of Fame only elects (three) players a year. This whole drug scandal. A-Rod was a great player, but now he’s not going to be in the Hall of Fame. It raises questions with young players, who feel they’re not going to make the Hall of Fame. They’re going to be judged in the same era as these steroid people.
“Baseball’s also a pastime.”
Moving on, Vivianne Linou of Skokie, next to Morton Grove, recalled how grandfather John Kotitsas was an avid Cubs fan. But love of baseball was not passed down.
“I just feel watching it when young, it never really clicked for me,” Linou said. “I remember asking my grandfather, ‘Hey, what’s going on? He said, ‘Hold on a second, hold on a second.’ And I said, ‘What are we holding on for?’ I played basketball and volleyball. I was always in that field (playing year-round). I never really thought of baseball at all.”
“The first-time ever I went to a Cubs game was three years ago. My sister had two free tickets. We sat down. I’m really trying to pay attention, give it a shot. I asked a person next to me, ‘What just happened?’ He said he was just here to have a beer and hang out.”
The endless negatives prompted me to interrupt the survey with this very bottom-line query: Would the Chicago-area residents have been more interested in baseball if the Cubs and White Sox been consistent winners with regular post-season visits?
Venetico said yes, citing the bandwagon-jumping of fans onto the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup success. Linou said no. Bell threw in the Bears’ monster popularity trumping even a Sox World Series triumph in his household in 2005.
As the survey resumed, a baseball advocate finally spoke up. Husnaa Vhora of south suburban Harvey, hometown of Hall of Famer Lou Boudreau, told how a family of baseball-lovin’ uncles sparked her interest.
Abdul and Abid Aziz, by her recollection, were “screaming and jumping” watching baseball at her grandparents’ house. “I was very much drawn to this,” said Vhora. “Over time, it just stuck to me. I continued watching it and became a loyal Cubs fan.”
She was finally locked in early in her teenage years, when Lou Piniella became manager and the Cubs made the playoffs two straight seasons for the only time since the first decade of the 20th century.
“A big problem with the generation is the attention thing,” said Vhora. “A lot of people feel why should they watch this for three hours? Then, knowing the Cubs, sometimes they lose in the last inning. A lot of younger people want to see something that’s more exciting. They don’t want to wait three hours to see their team lose. That’s why they like basketball and football.”
Baseball went off-track again when Caitlin Cleary of northwest suburban Elk Grove Village spoke up. She started out as a baseball fan. Woops – at age 5, hockey grabbed her loyalty.
“My cousin who lived in Boston took me to a Bruins game, and I loved it,” Cleary said. “My dad (Jim Cleary) is a big baseball (White Sox) fan.”
The journey ended and brought baseball’s batting average up to .250 with Rob Wash of west suburban Naperville. His parents were native South Siders, and the sporting interest centered around baseball. He became a throwback fan, seemingly out of step with his age cohorts.
Wash and his brother attend games together. “We’re not talking; we’re keeping score on our scoresheets,” he said. “I’ve got a binder full of scoresheets going back to 1987. It’s pretty cool.”
“From what I’ve heard people talk about baseball and the sport itself, I’m not surprised at all (with his classmates’ results). People ask me how can you go to a baseball game and sit there and not get drunk, just sit there and watch the game. For me, that sport can change so rapidly, so quickly, but at the same time, it can stay the same for such a long period of time. That’s thrilling to me.”
Petersen, the really deep thinker and outspoken member of the group, probably summed up the crux of baseball’s dilemma with the next generation of consumers.
The old codger prompting Petersen’s thought process had relatively few entertainment choices in a six-TV channel, six-major AM-station, four-newspaper, two-phone-line, and one-typewriter universe four decades ago. A Sunday doubleheader at Wrigley Field for $1 bleachers admission seemed the most attractive.
Now, Petersen said, his generation has the proverbial 1,000 channels at their command. Sometimes, too much entertainment available.
Baseball established its legendary status a century ago as America’s national pastime without much competition. When so many other avenues for the discretionary dollar and shorter attention spans began and thrived, baseball has not done enough, and acted too slowly (see replay issue) to hold its primo position.
