Is Baseball Far Behind Football In Popularity Nationally?
The last 2 games the Dallas Morning News hasn’t even had the world series results on the cover of its sports page. Instead it has been buried on page 6. The cover has been filled with stories of high school football and Cowboy coverage. Is this happening across the country?
Tags: Baseball, Behind, Football, Nationally, Popularity
Football is a great sport but it would NOT be the most popular sport if it weren’t for gambling.
Baseball is for purists.
I love the drama and the history of this great game.
As a baseball lover, and football being my second sport of passion, I would have to say yes. There is not enough constant action in baseball to keep your attention. Football is 60 mins of consatnt action.
Now in the case of Dallas, No Texas baseball team is worth reporting about, and Texas is a football driven state, especially Dallas. Plus Dallas’ football team is a running soap opera. The rest of the nation is enjoying the series for the most part.
Its apples & oranges…i have always said you have to look at this from a different agnle than just side by side. Baseball season is 162 games, while football is 16 games. If you took all the raitings from not just sundays/mondays, but took all those ratings & spread them out to the days when there is no football the raiting numbers would plumet.
In other words take All the rating from foot ball from one week, Monday through Sunday…& all the raiting from a week in baseball monday – sunday i am sure they would be a pretty close number.
It is the same idea with Nascar, there is only 1 race so of course the numbers are exponentially high. You can only watch on certain days then you are gonna watch, but baseball is there 7 days a week! It is very hard to compare sports!
If you really wanna see how popular a sport is, look around during the offseason & see who is wearing memorabilla when it is not in season & what do you see? Baseball Caps everywhere…even in November!
Things to look at are…what is overall participation at rec levels and beyond? Baseball, girls fastpitch, men’s softball and baseball…44million. Football 12million.
Football accounts for only 20% of baseball’s revenue, this is due in part to amount of games baseball plays. But football’s popularity and excitment is because it is only played once a week.
Also consider baseball is a family sport where you actually bring your son or daughter to a game. Football is corporate and/or drunk friends tailgating once a week on a sunday (event). Nothing you want to bring your young kids around. So the atmosphere is more party like with football, hence it’s popularity.
Listen, both are good sports compared to soccer
Only in television ratings. Baseball, from a marketing standpoint, still sell more more merchandise than the NFL, capture more of the female audience than football, and also are the only pro sport a family of four attend on average.
The only reason the Superbowl has such high ratings is because it is the only major sport that has just one game as opposed to a series to determine a champion. It also has a shorter home season and because all football fields are the same in dimensions, they could fit more seats during a short season where no two baseball parks share the same dimensions.
If the World Series was just one game and if they only played 16 games a season, they would have ratings numbers like football. Can you imagine if the Yankees only played Boston twice a year? You would never see a ticket!
In closng, consider this. Take the the five largest city markets that carry at least three pro teams. Who are the biggest teams in those markets?
New York: Yankees ( Mets are second)
Los Angeles : Lakers ( Dodgers followed by the Angels are 2nd and 3rd. They have also gone through three pro teams and they all left town-Chargers, Rams, and Raiders.)
Chicago- Cubs (Bears are 2nd and the White Sox are on their heals.)
Boston – Red Sox (There is no close second)
Atlanta – Braves (There is no close second)
The most popular sports team in the world is the New York Yankees. This is not even debatable. Kids in countries without baseball know about them and wear their merchandise. Do you think more kids in Ireland know who Brett Favre and Peyton Manning are than Babe Ruth and Derek Jeter? I don’t think so. Dallas Cowboys would be second and the it is the Red Sox and Cubs.
In closing, going by a Dallas newspaper is in no way indicative of the national market. Dallas is not one of the largest markets and Texas and Florida have always been football states. Granted, Tampa Bay and Philadelphia are not the best teams to market for the WS, but if you went to any state in the North East or West, the front sport covers and main stories would be talking about off season baseball moves during the heart of the NFL playoffs and college bowl games.
highly unlikely.
for starters, i’d be willing to be that tampa newspapers ran world series coverage on their front page. just a guess. probably Philly too.
but i understand where you’re going… so, for the other non – involved cities, i’d guess that some (like NY or Boston or LA or Chicago) ran stories on the world series on their front page, as opposed to football. now, come sunday, might be a different story.
but you have observed a general phenomenon in the south, especially in Texas, in that football is almost a religion. Fridays are sacred at all levels because of H.S. football (more widespread involvement), and saturdays and sundays are spent glued to the TV watching texas teams compete.
so it doesn’t suprise me.
if you’re bored, do a little google search of all the major cities online newspapers. i’ll do that occasionally just to hear the bias from another side (if there is any), and if another team has it’s own critic sportswriters. (after all, when you’re a lion fan, it’s the same story every year. just change the names/dates)
for instance … http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic…
add – good answer, Grape.
most people tend to not casually wear football helmets during the football offseason possibly because:
1) it’s the summer and it’s hot
2) no one will recognize them
3) dangerous for driving
4) hard to eat w/ it on
those are just POSSIBLE reasons why people don’t wear non-baseball hats during the offseason. i personally wouldn’t use that reason to prove that baseball is more popular. the other reasons were good enough. besides, baseball hats are practical because they block the sun. and just because it’s a baseball STYLE hat doesn’t mean that someone can’t slap an NFL logo on it. i wouldn’t judge a sports popularity (or absence thereof) because people are not wearing football helmets during the offseason. BUT… that’s just my opinion. food for thought.
well the fact that football teams play 16 games in a regular season and baseball teams play 162 games means that football will get better ratings. But the big seperater is the playoffs. Football playoffs kill baseball playoffs, so yes it is far more popular. But baseball has a strong and loyal following too.
Baseball is way better and the history of the game is beautiful. And someone said that texas brung them george w. bush. Bush threw out the first pitch in the 2001 world series at Yankee stadium. That was a great thing after a nation is attacked for the president to be playing baseball showing them that you can’t bring us down you attacked us but we’re still here playing.
Check the ratings. Football kills baseball. and I’m sure that’s especially true in Texas. Then again Texas brought us George W. Bush.
Dude, you’re in Texas. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pop Warner football gets better ratings than baseball. It also doesn’t help that your local baseball team has never even won a playoff series
I think football promotion does a better job than baseball. And I think it’s fairly evident by the stat they said last night, in ‘93 25% of the players in MLB were black, today it’s 8%
Yes. Football is waaaaaay more popular.
YES!!! WAY! BEHIND!
probably