Baseball’s Core TV Demographic? Multi-taskers
By Sam Stern
October 20, 2004
I am watching Game 6 of the ALCS, it has drama, it has suspense, it has me on the edge of my seat. It also has me doing random tasks around the apartment and now writing a story for you. Why?
Because in the average baseball game, there is an outrageous amount of time between pitches, and playoff baseball is even worse.
Even though the Sox are up 4-0 and Hideki Matsui is at the plate with 2 on and no outs, I do not have to give the TV my undivided attention. I can flick my eyes over to the screen every 40-50 seconds, catch the 1-2 seconds of action – except on every 5th pitch when I have to watch an extra 3 seconds of action as the ball is put into play – and then go back to writing or folding laundry or watching the Arsenal-Aston Villa soccer match on Fox Sports World. Matsui just popped out, here comes Bernie Williams, which means I’ll have 90 seconds between pitches while he steps out and contemplates his graying sideburns and god knows what else.
My point is not that baseball isn’t fun to watch – foul ball from Bernie so I have 2 uninterrupted minutes here – but that I can watch it and do other things. So far tonight, I have folded the laundry, put it away, sent a few emails to friends, checked my voicemail, written three paragraphs of this story, given my wife a massage, bathed my dog, and watched 30 minutes of the Arsenal-Aston Villa game, all while literally not missing a pitch. That includes eating dinner during the time that the game was supposedly on from 8:00 – 8:25, but that was just useless blather from Jeannie Zalasko and the guy with the moustache on the Fox Studio show.
I used to think that Football was just as slow as baseball, but it’s not. I was flipping back and forth between the Red Sox game and Monday Night Football yesterday, and I would get in a play, sometimes two of the Football game, between PITCHES. Not at bats, pitches. There are probably 250-300 pitches in the average baseball game – more in these Sox-Yanks marathons – and no more than 100 plays from scrimmage in the average NFL game, and Football packs the action in a lot tighter.
The gaps between action are not a problem for me, because I am a born multi-tasker. After each pitch, I snap into action. During the early innings, I immediately flip the channel to the Arsenal game, catching 5 or 6 well-struck passes and 1 or 2 crunching tackles before I need to flip back to the game. At halftime of the soccer game, I fold laundry, and put it away. Joe Buck makes the task even easier by providing a prelude to each pitch that gives you a heads up on when to focus on the game.
When friends argue that they don’t like to watch baseball on TV because it is so boring, my response is always that I enjoy the pace of the game, because it doesn’t require my undivided attention. During games, I can read a book, check my stocks, cook dinner, and anything else that I can’t be bothered to do as stand-alone activities. But intersperse these mundane tasks with walks, strikeouts and even the occasional run, and they become much less arduous – Posada just grounded out, meaning that I wrote nearly 500 words in a half inning of baseball, and I didn’t miss a pitch.
If you have trouble watching baseball on TV because you find it boring, I suggest creating a To-do list before the game and then marveling at how much of it you find accomplished by the end of the game. Baseball isn’t slow and boring, it motivates us to do many things at once and be efficient with our time, all while taking in 4-5 hours of TV. What could be more American than that?
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