On Sunday, the world’s greatest Tweeter, Bruce Levine was on the Score talking about all of new MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s ideas about how to make baseball more interesting for “young people.”  The ideas, hopefully aren’t really Manfred’s, because they were all asinine.

Levine enjoyed a somewhat chummy relationship with Interim Commissioner of Baseball for Life Bud Selig, and he’d like to have a similar one with Manfred, and so he’s been enthusiastically advocating anything Manfred has suggested the past few weeks.

Bruce’s suggestions on Sunday included how to make television coverage of games more interesting for “young people.”  Levine points out that baseball has a “huge problem” because their fanbase is getting older.  He cited the fact that the average age of people who watched last year’s All-Star Game was 54.  Here’s how Bruce says baseball can fix that problem.

  • More use of split screen — he didn’t say what to put on the second screen, but kids love cartoons, so maybe that?
  • More graphics on the screen — yes, please, we need more.  Maybe just cover the screen in graphics so the kids don’t have to actually see any of the baseball game
  • Video of previous at bats featuring the current hitter and batter — oh please, let’s fill every break in the action with unrelated highlights.  That’s a great idea.

Incredibly, he couched his suggestion of how to improve the radio broadcasts by saying it’s “something the White Sox already do really well.”

What?  Ed Farmer and Darrin Jackson are basically unlistenable.  You can make a pretty effective argument that both sets of White Sox broadcasters (radio and TV) are huge reasons why the team can’t gain any popularity.  I’m not saying that you have to hire announcers who relate to 12 year olds, but maybe don’t keep an insane 73 year old around who thinks entertaining fans of any age includes telling stories about Yaz and his golf game.

Levine said the broadcasts should be set up like talk shows, where the announcers just “allude” to what’s going on, on the field.

The scary thing is that people a lot smarter than Bruce Levine think baseball is in dire need of being “fixed.”  The games take too long, they’re too boring, people strike out too much so there’s not enough action.

The Wall Street Journal reported a couple of years ago that when you cut out all the time players spend standing around, scratching themselves or waiting for stuff to happen that there’s actually only 18 minutes of “action” in a baseball game.  Good lord, who would spend on average three hours watching something when only 18 minutes of it is actually things happening on the field?

Well, the Wall Street Journal also reported a couple of years before that, that in an average National Football League game, the ball is only in play for 11 minutes.

Is anybody in the NFL worried that the games are taking too long?  They’re mostly trying to figure out how to cram more boner pill and Budweiser commercials into them.

Now, I can’t talk out of both sides of my mouth, here.  Over the last eight years I’ve become a fan of English Premier League soccer.  Some of the reasons it appeals to me are that it’s constant action (baseball’s not), the games normally take exactly two hours to play (with Greg Maddux gone, that doesn’t happen in baseball anymore), it’s played in the morning when there’s nothing else on, and the atmosphere is always so good.

A perfect storm got me interested in soccer.  The 2006 World Cup looked great in HD, so I watched a lot of it.  The games are on when I otherwise would be watching college or NFL football pregame shows, and I swore those off at about that same time, and I’m a sucker for a good British accent.  Now that NBC Sports has the contract it’s even better.  They cover the games in the kind of professional, understated way that I wish every sport would, and I’ve got quite a bit of a crush on Rebecca Lowe, which certainly helps.  And, it absolves me of any guilt from drinking beer at 7 in the morning.

Just like in every other sport, I did a shit job of picking a team to follow.  I went with Arsenal.  Cool name, great history, a Nick Hornby book and a Colin Firth movie, and I managed to come on board just when their unprecedented run of success was over.  Ugh.

So what does this have to do with baseball?  Nothing, really.

Baseball is freaked out that their average age per viewer of the World Series is 52.  Compare that to the average age of viewer of the Super Bowl (43), NBA Finals (40), Stanley Cup (46) and MLS Cup (39), and baseball’s the oldest.  Advertisers love viewers 18-36 the most, but there’s a lot of money to be made 25-54, too.  You’re trying to build brand loyalty in the younger group, you’re just trying to get disposable cash out of the older group.

Baseball makes a shit ton of money out of that older group.  Drug companies love the NFL and MLB.  In fact, if you watch a baseball game for an hour you get the idea that they think you have high cholesterol, a limp penis, and are in serious need of a diaper.  Hey, it’s like they have a camera in my house!

What baseball is most concerned about is TV in general and their own streaming service MLB.tv in particular.  Their teams make the bulk of their income from huge regional TV deals, and the league makes a crapload off of MLB.tv.  It’s why they, to this point, have been unwilling to fix their archaic blackout rules and territories.  I’m sure they have some very smart guys convincing them to hold onto those with all their might because it allows the regional networks to lay claim to 100 percent of the viewers in greatly exaggerated geographic areas, but it’s telling that they’re finally getting serious about eliminating in market MLB.tv blackouts.

Right now if you live in the Chicago area and you really only want to watch Cubs or White Sox games, MLB.tv is a waste of money for you.  Every one of those games will be blacked out on your phone, your tablet, your XBoxOne, PS4, Apple TV, etc.  You can watch all of the out-of-market games you want.  When I was in Michigan the last few years, MLB.tv was great.  I couldn’t watch Tigers games on it, but who cares?  Now that I’m back, getting MLB.tv makes no sense.  How are you supposed to increase your reach to your beloved “younger people” when you make it impossible for them to watch your games on the devices they use to access media the most?

It’s somewhat likely that this year, hopefully before the end of Spring Training, they’ll eliminate those blackouts.  Right now their talks are at an “impasse” with Fox Sports Net, but that’s somebody (likely both sides) posturing.  There’s money to be made.  They’ll sell more MLB.tv subscriptions, and they’ll start getting more aggressive about running ads on those broadcasts.  It’s strange to watch a game and when it goes to commercial you just get a blue screen that says your game is in a commercial break.  Who’s not selling this?

On Monday, MLB announced they were discontinuing the MLB Fan Cave.  The average age of Fan Cave viewers?  Thirty.  Instead of killing it, why not just try to make it better?

There is lots of talk about speeding up the pace of the game.  Some of the changes are logical.  Make batters get in, and stay in the damn batter’s box.  Call the strike zone as it is in the rule book which would make for more hittable strikes, and therefore more balls put in play.

But the nonsense about a pitch clock, or eliminating defensive shifts (if a lefty batter can’t figure out how to take advantage of no defenders on the infield between second and third base he shouldn’t be in the big leagues), is just dumb.

Baseball attendance is not diminishing, and you could argue that the fact they weathered teams in their third and fourth largest markets (Chicago and Houston) actively trying to lose games the last four years, is a pretty good sign that people still like going to games.

World Series ratings are down, but live sports has never been more valuable programming than it is right now, and baseball’s making more TV money than ever before.

Will that start to dry out?  Probably, but the solution isn’t to gimmick up the game in a futile attempt to make it seem younger and more hip.  There are plenty of kids who love baseball the way it is, and they continue to love it as they get older (and more valuable to advertisers).  Baseball needs to figure out how to make the games more accessible to the people who want it (while making some bucks off those people), and stop worrying about protecting outdated business practices while simultaneously mucking up the on-field product and risk alienating the fans they do have.

Baseball’s a great game, and has been for well more than 100 years.  The only times it has been in peril are when the owners and players actively tried to fuck it up.  So, maybe don’t do that?