America's Pastime in Decline

Howdy,

Welcome to the 2 new folks who subscribed to the newsletter this past week!

Last week, we discussed the hit TV show "Yellowstone" and how it relates to the rural-urban divide.

This week, we're discussing our decreasing attention span, how it relates to the decline of baseball, and what we can learn from the lost art of patience + critical thinking.

Plus, we've got more photos from the road at the end of the newsletter!

Our collective attention span is decreasing.

In 2000, the average attention span was 13 seconds. Fast forward to 2015 and our attention span has decreased to just 8 seconds.

If you frequently use the internet, your attention span is even smaller at just 3-5 seconds.

Why is that? We live in an age of information abundance. We are so inundated by information on our devices that we could not possibly consume all of it.

Our decreased attention span is a result of our brain's need to filter what is and isn't worth paying attention to. I expanded upon the art of "paying" attention in a previous essay here.

Decreased attention spans require modern digital media tactics. Creators rely on eye-popping thumbnails to get you to engage with YouTube videos or an attention-grabbing opening to a TikTok video to get you to stop scrolling.

Image courtesy of mAdme Technologies ltd. 2017

America's attention span is on the decline, and so is the sport of baseball.

Here are a few figures breaking down baseball's decline:

Average MLB Attendance: (2008) 78.5 million -> (2019) 68.5 million

Average Little League Participation: (1990) 3 million -> (2015) 2.4 million

Average World Series Viewership: (1986) ~36 million -> (2020) ~10 million

The average viewer and season ticket holder are over the age of 55, and that statistic continues to get older.

The sport has been on a downward trajectory for decades with no clear path toward engaging future generations.

Graph and statistics from How They Play.

Baseball's decline results from the MLB's inability to capture our attention in the digital age of media.

Consider the era of media that we're in today. We are consumed by breaking news alerts and content that has been produced within the last 24 hours.

Now consider the bygone era of media in which baseball was most popular - traditional print media. Pieces of information oftentimes took days to reach their destination and people sat down to consume information in a slow manner. In other words, there was less competition for people's attention.

Keeping people's attention has become increasingly harder due to the age of information abundance.

This required the MLB to adapt and become more creative with their media tactics.

Spoiler: they had trouble with the curve.

Sports thrive when they have a go-to face of the game. NBA = Lebron James. NFL = Tom Brady. Many argue that the MLB hasn't had a true face to the game since Derek Jeter retired in 2014.

The NBA took a different approach than the MLB, and it paid off.

When social media rose to prominence in the 2010s, the NBA chose not to copyright its content. This enabled creators on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. to create original content promoting the sport. The NBA felt that engaging future generations of fans on their phones would be more important to growing the game in the long run than generating short-term profits through copywriting images and videos from their games.

Baseball took the exact opposite approach, and they have suffered as a result.

Major League Baseball restricted the widespread sharing of their content without the league's explicit permission. As a result, the league struggled to build up the brand value of its individual players and advance the game as a whole.

Angels center fielder Mike Trout is the talent of a generation and may go down statistically as an all-time great. His Q score, a measure of how notable an athlete is amongst the public, was just 22 - meaning that only 1 in 5 Americans know who he is. A Q score of 22 is the equivalent of a bench player on an NBA team (Source).

Baseball is a chess match, not a quick game of checkers.

I don't want to be overly critical of the MLB when contrasting their decisions with the NBA. Basketball is a fast, explosive sport that acts as a highlight factory. Baseball is slow and methodical, unlike our fast-paced, sensationalized news cycles. This new era of media would've been difficult to navigate even if the MLB had done a better job promoting its players.

In fact, the beauty of the game is that it suspends time itself, and entertainment from the sport is derived from your ability to analyze the chess match going on between the lines. Here are just a few examples:

• positional adjustments in the field based on the batter

• how a pitcher will attack an opposing batter's weaknesses at the plate

• pitch count and how much stamina a pitcher has to go deep into a game

• the consistency of the bullpen and whether they can take over the game

• changing position in the batter's box based on the pitcher's arm strength

• navigating the base paths based on a pitcher's delivery and a catcher's arm strength

Baseball truly does have quite a bit of exciting information to process, but you have to read between the lines and think critically to extract that excitement.

Shohei Ohtani, the 2021 AL MVP, is the best pitcher/hitter combination in almost a century. Originally from Japan, Ohtani represents the game's best opportunity to grow internationally right now.

The MLB must adapt its marketing tactics to preserve the beauty of the game.

Baseball will not be able to fully capture the art of the sport in short clips online, but the MLB has to at least try in order to build initial points of contact with younger generations.

If the MLB treats digital media as the initial funnel to capture the attention of new viewers, then lessons about the beauty of the game can follow thereafter.

One final note - consider the lost art of patiently analyzing the beauty of baseball with respect to your daily media consumption outside of sports.

You have a computer in your pocket more powerful than what got us to the moon. It has access to Greek philosophy, major religious texts, and the works of every notable author in recorded history. Yet, we spend our time consuming cheap content produced in the last 24 hours.

Perhaps the highest forms of value and entertainment don't come from the fleeting moments of virality that compete for our attention, but rather timeless art forms that require patience and critical thinking to dive into their depths - much like the sport of baseball.

Photos of the week

Locations this past week: Myrtle Beach, SC -> Durham, NC

Took in a Durham Bulls (Triple-A, Tampa Bay Rays) victory over the Gwinnett Stripers (Triple-A, Atlanta Braves). Seeing the art in person provided the inspiration for this piece. If you need to ground yourself in how lucky we are as Americans (which is much needed these days), just go to a ballgame and take in the atmosphere of a bunch of adults playing a children's game. Not everyone is as fortunate to remove themselves from the troubles of the world and take in the beauty of the play on the field and the community in the stands, even if just for a few hours.

Hung out at the American Tobacco Campus (ATC) after the game. The ATC project was a massive restoration of buildings left behind by the tobacco industry. The ATC is now home to offices, restaurants, art studios, a documentary theater, a public radio station, a YMCA, + much more.

Shot of the water running through the ATC. Durham was nicknamed the “Bull City” in the late 1800s when the Blackwell Tobacco Company named its product “Bull” Durham Tobacco. That led to the naming of the city's minor league baseball team, the Durham Bulls. The team became well known following the 1988 release of the movie Bull Durham, starring Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon.

A train car that has been repurposed into an innovation hub complete with whiteboards at the ATC with a "Lucky Strike" branded smoke stack and water tower in the distance.

Thanks for reading

Go tell someone about our decreased attention spans and baseball's decline,

Josh

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