Strike or Lockout (was Re: Eric's Big Contract)
Myles Sussman
>The players DON'T want to "mess it up". They want no changes at all to the
>current system, save some "guarantee" against owner collusion. I think
>they are also asking for arbitration time to be lowered back to 2 years
>service instead of 3, but that's all I've heard.
>
>It's the OWNERS who want to make wholesale changes to the basic agreement.
>Most of the talk is not about a "strike", but about a "lockout". A very
>large difference there.
Well, it makes sense that the owners want to change things because
they are having to caugh up their big profits. Still, from the owners
perspective, I wouldn't want to rock the boat with the fans. The
Super Bowl had its highest ratings in 1982, and the first 80's football
strike followed. Some say that football has not yet recovered the
lost fan interest from its two strikes. Another baseball strike
would only add to the growing fan interest in basketball and take
away paying customers.
Myles Sussman
No strike, no lockout, let's play ball!
Myles Sussman
>How do you see that? Fan interest in football was stagnant BEFORE the
>strikes; moreover, the interest took it on the chin when they invented
>scab ball to fill the second strike, and let the games count.
I don't agree. I think fan interest in football levelled off
only AFTER the 1982 strike. Prior to that ratings were growing on TV,
I believe. The 1982 Super Bowl was the highest rated game, just
prior to the strike. I don't think that is a coincidence, especially
since even the Giants and Bears with their large following didn't
draw a higher rating. I agree that the scab games did more damage,
but the first strike started the stagnation of football interest.
>Fan interest in baseball grew throughout the 70's, and again throughout
>the 80's. Record attendance almost every year, record ratings, record
>TV contracts.
I don't think the TV ratings have grown since the last baseball
strike, though attendance is up. ABC used to do 19 Monday Night
Baseball games, I think, but they began cutting back because ratings
were not so hot. NBC did not get a larger audience for its
Saturday games (hence CBS will only do 12 games next year)
and the Royals-Cardinals and Twins-Cardinals World Series had very
poor ratings.
My point is that fan interest will be reduced if the players
strike OR the owners lock the players out. If this happens
when the basketball "playoff season" is still thundering along
on its endless journey, basketball will benefit. Basketball
has seen the most explosive growth in the last 10 years, and
maybe it is not just a coincidence that they haven't had a
strike yet.
Myles Sussman
tim...@ernie.berkeley.edu
|How do you see that? Fan interest in football was stagnant BEFORE the
|strikes; moreover, the interest took it on the chin when they invented
|scab ball to fill the second strike, and let the games count.
What's interesting about the 1987 football season was that the scab
games made no difference in the playoff teams or their rankings for home
fields.
David M Tate
>
> I don't think the TV ratings have grown since the last baseball
>strike, though attendance is up. ABC used to do 19 Monday Night
>Baseball games, I think, but they began cutting back because ratings
It's a pretty bold leap from the poor ratings of ABC baseball to a decline in
baseball fan interest. I'm a baseball maniac, and _I_ don't watch Monday night
baseball 2/3 of the time. I can explain that in 3 words:
McCarver
Michaels
Palmer.
(Where have you gone Joe Garagiola? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you...)
--
David M. Tate | DISCLAIMER:
dt...@unix.cis.pitt.edu | "Hey, that's *my* dis!"
_____________________________________________________________________________
Statistics is the science of inferring the obvious and the false.
John Vander Borght
>In article <80...@portia.Stanford.EDU> my...@portia.Stanford.EDU (Myles Sussman) writes:
>>
>> I don't think the TV ratings have grown since the last baseball
>>strike, though attendance is up. ABC used to do 19 Monday Night
>>Baseball games, I think, but they began cutting back because ratings
>>were not so hot. [...]
>
>It's a pretty bold leap from the poor ratings of ABC baseball to a decline in
>baseball fan interest. I'm a baseball maniac, and _I_ don't watch Monday night
>baseball 2/3 of the time. I can explain that in 3 words:
I'll give you another 2 words: tape delay. Our local station doesn't show
the game until 8PM even though it starts at 5 on the West Coast. Since I
can turn on Sports Center at 8:30 and find out the results I wouldn't
to watch unless it was a game I really cared about. The local ABC station
also tape delays Monday Night Football any hour here. Real annoying habit.
> McCarver
> Michaels
> Palmer.
Actually I liked them a lot better than most of the other announcers I've
heard on television.
>
>(Where have you gone Joe Garagiola? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you...)
--
"Laddie, throw me that ball. I thought so. The bugger isn't round."
- Arthur Lees, British pro, after missing a 30-foot putt
|-----u n-----|
\O John Vander Borght O/
| uunet!sequent!john | o
| (503)526-4502 |
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| o | | |
Marc Sabatella
>baseball fan interest. I'm a baseball maniac, and _I_ don't watch Monday night
>baseball 2/3 of the time. I can explain that in 3 words:
> Michaels
> Palmer.
I can explain it better. It is only on sporadically, and sometimes moves to
Thursday if they are running a miniseries or something on Monday. It is not
a tradition in the sense of of the NBC Game Of The Week, which amazingly enough
comes on every Saturday during baseball season (sometimes even at the same
time, too).
Marc
Steve Simrin
>
Garagiola is going to host Baseball Sunday, a syndicated radio show that
I believe is scheduled to start 4/1. I think this is the same show that
had Bill James on it last year. It's a call-in show and I thought it was
well done.