By Mike Herold
Correspondent
In this age of 24/7 sports coverage, frequent player arrests and dozens of athletes dating Kim Kardashian at a time, fans need something new and exciting every day to hold our interest. We crave the thrills of a controversy, the discussions we can have about who was right in an on-field argument and the spectacle of a brawl.
Basically, we want our sports to entertain us not only during the games, but also on ESPN the next day.
And baseball, you’re slacking off.
Think about it — we call you “America’s Pastime” not as the compliment it once was, but in more of a “Well, we need to kill a few hours and I don’t feel like having to pay attention to anything. Hey, there’s a baseball game on, that should be easy to watch while napping,” kind of way. You have so many games that none of them matter all that much. You aren’t like football or basketball in that every game players are knocking each other down and a fight could break out at any moment.
Let’s face it, baseball, you’re kind of boring us. Fear not though, there are changes you (and by you, we mean your players, managers and league) can easily make that will stop us from dreading the summer months where you are the only sport in business.
For example, you could make some sort of nudge-nudge-wink-wink-not-a-rule that at least once every night some player has to charge the mound. We’d eat that up! Failing that, if there haven’t been any punches thrown, the managers of the night’s final game could accuse each other of something. It doesn’t matter what. Just think about it — last week, Tom Coughlin yelled at Greg Schiano and we’ve had discussions, Facebook polls and back-and-forth bickering ever since. You just don’t get that kind of attention anymore, baseball, and you have so much potential for it!
Here’s another idea: we all know you want to get away from the steroids thing. But we still love it when a player gets ousted for steroid use. So throw us a bone, baseball. Any time the news gets slow, “leak” the news that another star has been linked to steroids! We’ll be talking about you for weeks after that!
Basically, baseball, we fans have kind of outgrown you. If you want us back, you’re going to need to prove it. And there’s nothing that does the trick quite like a story we all love to hate.
