By Christine Brennan
Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig went to the Milwaukee Brewers playoff game Sunday, which should come as no surprise since he once owned the team. While there, he also found himself doing what most other sports fans were doing over the weekend: keeping an eye on an NFL game.
"We were head to head," Selig said in a phone interview Wednesday. "I was watching our game at Miller Park, and the Packers game was on all over, so I knew what was going on. I was also watching the Yankee-Detroit game. But, sure, I was keeping up with the game in Green Bay. I'm a director of the Packers. I love the game. I'm a pro football fan."
Aren't we all?
It is at this time of year that America's identity as a football nation comes most clearly into focus. Nothing proves the point more succinctly than this bit of news reported by USA TODAY's Michael Hiestand: Fox's NFL pregame show Sunday received a bigger overnight rating than any of TBS' baseball playoff games through the weekend.
It's true. A football pregame show was watched by more people than either of the first two Yankees-Tigers postseason games. Or any of the other series, which included the big-market Phillies and Rangers.
It appears that we're not just a nation of football fans, but also a nation that has decided to make a day of it with the NFL. Or merely a bunch of fantasy players and bettors needing lots of final information before kickoff. How else do we explain more people choosing to watch a show setting up the day in pro football than choosing to watch any of the real games — meaningful, interesting, important postseason baseball games?
"Can I explain that to you? No," Selig said. "I'm not sure why that is. We've had four games a day, so we're asking a lot of the fans. Remember, we're on cable for this round. But I'll say this: If I take all the evidence today — our attendance, what we're doing on the Internet, our gross revenue — I'm very satisfied. Baseball is more popular than ever."
As Selig noted, the Brewers, who drew more than 3 million fans this year while winning the National League Central, were playing at the same time as the Packers. Green Bay's game against Denver turned into a 49-23 Packers rout. The Brewers also ended up winning big, 9-4, against Arizona. If I had had to guess, I would have said the TV ratings in Milwaukee for the two games would have been about equal, considering the Packers were early in their season, while the Brewers were in a crucial, best-of-five postseason series.
It wasn't even close. The Packers attracted 44.1% of the households in Milwaukee, the Brewers just 20.3%.
Americans are big-event fans now more than ever, and the NFL has intelligently marketed itself as the ultimate big deal. Either that or we just can't seem to find TBS and TNT with the remote. There's a hide-and-seek aspect to finding these early MLB playoff games that simply doesn't exist when turning on the NFL.
Perhaps it's also just too many games at too many unusual times for a normal fan to digest.
"If you're on the West Coast, you're turning on the ballgames only to find out they started several hours ago," said David M. Carter, executive director of the University of Southern California Sports Business Institute and author of Money Games. "Some of these games can be pretty difficult to catch. Think about the NFL playoffs. They tend to mimic the regular-season schedule time-frame-wise with afternoon and evening games. The postseason baseball schedule, however, isn't always what we are accustomed to."
The old complaints that baseball is too methodical for our impatient, video-game society still apply, of course. But one would think people who love sports would put that aside for the postseason, especially this year after last Wednesday's compelling wild-card drama on the final day of the regular season.
"People say baseball is slow," Selig said. "I don't think it's slow at all. It builds. Only baseball could produce Wednesday night. Only baseball could write that script. Going back and forth between games, it couldn't have been more fun."
All you football fans will have to take his word for it.
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