Baseball or Football

[Palmer]

football....and it's not even close.

I have not followed baseball since the strike...and especially the steroid era that ruined the record books.

 

[jbhtexas]

football....and it's not even close.

Palmer has spoken...and thus the issue is settled. You just can't debate that...

 

[Palmer]

Palmer has spoken...and thus the issue is settled. You just can't debate that...

I meant for me in my statement....


but I do like you line of thinking! :idea:

 

[jbhtexas]

I meant for me in my statement....


but I do like you line of thinking! :idea:

I only wish you had spoken about 70 posts ago so I wouldn't have got caught up in this one...

 

[gocubs2118]

The way the two sports are set up, football is going to be more popular. You only have a game a week and everything builds up to that particular game. In baseball when you have 6 or 7 games in a week its hard to excited for each game, though not for me. Even for the playoffs where there are a series of games for each round in baseball compared to just one game in football. If they were set up the same, as in baseball only had one game a week, I think people might be surprised as to how more popular baseball would be.

 

[clone2011]

I love baseball much more than football....but football is more popular, hands down.

 

[cyhiphopp]

We debunked this argument about 30 posts ago. With such a large disparity in the number of home games, it is nearly impossible to predict what average attendance would be if the NFL played way more home games, or if MLB played way less home games.

As I asked before (and no one answered), why doesn't the NFL play more games per week? There is nothing stopping them from making the necessary roster changes to do that. I suspect they don't do it because there wouldn't be enough fan support to make money at it.

If the NFL played too many more games in the season, there would be a lot more franchise QBs hurt throughout the year. This is what stops them from expanding the season. Many even propose limiting the preseason games to prevent injuries. Football is a contact sport and guys can gety hurt a lot easier than in baseball. (Not to say that baseball players don't get hurt.)
Also, the NFL has games on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday nights and they all have huge attendence. College football is on several times a week as well and has good ratings most every day.
If the NFL did add say, 4 more games per year, I think the average attendence would be the same. People with season tickets would be there every weekend.
I think baseball is more of a polarizing sport than football. I will watch any football game on TV, college or pro. I think there are a lot of people out there that would say the same. Most baseball fans are mostly fans of just one team and follow them religiously.
One thing that I think is tellis is that there are more mlb teams that have attendance problems and can't fill their stadium. You don't see that as much in the NFL, probably because there is more parity and teams (except for the Lions) can get good again quickly.
A previous poster made a point about the salary disparity in the MLB. That is a huge problem for the league. It means that the rich, more often than not, will continue to get richer. The NFL has limits so that one team cannot just buy the best players every year ala the Yankees.

Personally, I love both football and baseball, but football is more popular, at least to me, and it really is an apples vs oranges comparison.

 

[cyhiphopp]

First of all, I've brought up several statistics, not just one.

Secondly, the overall attendance argument isn't ridiculous. You simply don't understand it. The reason there are way more MLB baseball games than NFL games is because MLB can make money playing that many games, and the NFL can't. Plain and simple.

As I've said a couple of times already, it would certainly be possible for the NFL to play several FB games a week, but it would require increasing roster size so that the same people didn't play every game. It would increase NFL expenses. The reason the NFL doesn't do it because they likely think that they will not be able to draw 60,000+ fans to all the extra games in order to support the salaries of the extra players. If the NFL could double the number of games and get the fans to support it so that they could make money, why wouldn't they would do it?

(Sorry, same argument as before kind of, but you added to it, so I wanted to respond.)
The NFL is so popular because their star players DO play every week. They sell their star players way more than MLB does. The NFL cant risk getting superstars hurt playing ten more games a year. I really do believe that the NFL could sell out most of their games if they added more.

 

[MeanDean]

Speaking just for me, Football is good at the stadium, then you add in the tailgating and you have a shared experience. Football is easier for me to watch because the action is always defined by the beginning (hike) and end of the play (whistle). Baseball at the park is also a shared experience. I do find I miss some of the action because I kind of drift off into looking at something else in the park and then hear the crack of the bat only to find I missed the whole thing so feel cheated (or like a fool for not paying attention). Football is much better suited for television. Baseball on television (FOR ME!!) is pure torture. 3 and a half hours with 2 minutes of actual action crammed in there. I just can't sit and watch televised baseball. So I voted for football.

 

[cybsball20]

There is a reason that ESPN has a daily football show and it's the same reason that Playmakers was canceled. As long as ESPN has the NFL deal they have to hype and kiss up to the NFL as much as possible.

 

[chuckd4735]

First of all, I've brought up several statistics, not just one.

Secondly, the overall attendance argument isn't ridiculous. You simply don't understand it. The reason there are way more MLB baseball games than NFL games is because MLB can make money playing that many games, and the NFL can't. Plain and simple.

As I've said a couple of times already, it would certainly be possible for the NFL to play several FB games a week, but it would require increasing roster size so that the same people didn't play every game. It would increase NFL expenses. The reason the NFL doesn't do it because they likely think that they will not be able to draw 60,000+ fans to all the extra games in order to support the salaries of the extra players. If the NFL could double the number of games and get the fans to support it so that they could make money, why wouldn't they would do it?

No, the reason there are more MLB games is because the human body can handle more game of baseball than it can football...

 

[cyhiphopp]

There is a reason that ESPN has a daily football show and it's the same reason that Playmakers was canceled. As long as ESPN has the NFL deal they have to hype and kiss up to the NFL as much as possible.

Serious question, and not just inflamitory. Do you think that ESPN caters to football to purposefully spite baseball?

 

[NewCoke]

Ok I had a nice long post about the different nature of the average football fan vs. average baseball fan. Passive vs. rabid / relaxing vs adrenaline pumping. And how these different types of fans relate to different coverage on ESPN and perception of attendance. I must have forgotten to push submit or it got deleted for reasons that pass my understanding, but I am not going to type it out again. But the Summary was it is tough to declare a winner, and they don't compete much with each other so it works out great for both sports. I also had a line which I liked about Baseball being America's past time but Football being America's sport.

 

[cybsball20]

Serious question, and not just inflamitory. Do you think that ESPN caters to football to purposefully spite baseball?

No, but if they had a better deal to carry baseball they would do more for it. As it is they run live Baseball Tonight 2-3 times a day, thats not bad. I do know that they were pretty upset about the MLB network and thats why they didn't run Baseball Tonight as much in the off season this year.

 

[isufbcurt]

Baseball to me is about as boring as watching golf!!!!!!!!!!

 

[cyhiphopp]

No, but if they had a better deal to carry baseball they would do more for it. As it is they run live Baseball Tonight 2-3 times a day, thats not bad. I do know that they were pretty upset about the MLB network and thats why they didn't run Baseball Tonight as much in the off season this year.

I understand your argument. ESPN pushes their live coverage of NFL games with more coverage of NFL in general. Makes sense. I wish ESPN would carry more baseball games too. I would rather watch any baseball game than the 2007 World Series of Poker rerun.

 

[cybsball20]

I understand your argument. ESPN pushes their live coverage of NFL games with more coverage of NFL in general. Makes sense. I wish ESPN would carry more baseball games too. I would rather watch any baseball game than the 2007 World Series of Poker rerun.

National baseball games are going to be fewer and far between in my opinion. I have been researching this a while and it seems that fans are going back to being fans of one team. In the early part of the century, when games were on radio, most people were fans of their team and didn't really care about other teams. When TV came around there started to be more National games and you had more people that were just fans of baseball and knew there were going to be games on Saturday, Sunday, etc. When WGN and TBS started to carry one team, you had Cubs fans and Braves fans popping up everywhere and very loyal to their team. Now every team has their own network where fans can go to watch games. If their team is playing on a regional network at 4, they certainly aren't going to turn the channel and watch Sunday night baseball...

 

[cyhiphopp]

Ok I had a nice long post about the different nature of the average football fan vs. average baseball fan. Passive vs. rabid / relaxing vs adrenaline pumping. And how these different types of fans relate to different coverage on ESPN and perception of attendance. I must have forgotten to push submit or it got deleted for reasons that pass my understanding, but I am not going to type it out again. But the Summary was it is tough to declare a winner, and they don't compete much with each other so it works out great for both sports. I also had a line which I liked about Baseball being America's past time but Football being America's sport.

Interesting point about past time versus sport.
It really makes sense when you compare baseball to football.

 

[BryceC]

I would say football is more popular for one reason - at every level, high school, college, and pro, it is the highest revenue generating sport despite having the fewest number of games. People are willing to pay more to go watch football.

Especially at the college and high school level nobody can deny that it is the biggest sport from a fan perspective. I don't see how a legit argument could be formed. We had a better baseball team than a football team in high school and hardly anybody went.

Baseball doesn't begin to have the fan support until it gets to the pro leagues outside of certain regions.

 

[cyhiphopp]

National baseball games are going to be fewer and far between in my opinion. I have been researching this a while and it seems that fans are going back to being fans of one team. In the early part of the century, when games were on radio, most people were fans of their team and didn't really care about other teams. When TV came around there started to be more National games and you had more people that were just fans of baseball and knew there were going to be games on Saturday, Sunday, etc. When WGN and TBS started to carry one team, you had Cubs fans and Braves fans popping up everywhere and very loyal to their team. Now every team has their own network where fans can go to watch games. If their team is playing on a regional network at 4, they certainly aren't going to turn the channel and watch Sunday night baseball...

That makes sense. If every NFL team had their own network to broadcast on (and it wasn't hugely expensive), I would watch every Steelers game and skip the national broadcasts otherwise. I think the NFL does a good job at selling whatever game they have featured. That helps NFL popularity.