Radio Sports Talk and Baseball

All national sports talk radio follows the same format when the subject of baseball eventually comes up.  One, ghetto the coverage into its own special segment, unlike other sports, which get stream-of-conscious coverage throughout the show.  Two, apologize to the audience for talking about baseball, instead of some more important sport.  Three, assure the audience that you will quickly return to talking about those more important sports immediately after this segment.  And finally four, make sure the audience knows how little you care for baseball and how you totally empathize with them. 

When discussing baseball, make sure to mention its low ratings, unpopularity, how boring it is, how meaningless the regular season games are, and all the things that the MLB does wrong.  Dump any baseball coverage to talk about the Olympics or the World Cup, if they’re taking place.  Offhandedly mention that you were a baseball fan as a kid.  This implies that baseball is somehow a sport that you outgrow, like soccer.  When you're an adult, you watch football, golf, and the basketball.  Somehow these sports are more mature.

Baseball is a hard sport for general sports talk radio.  They play every day and the players and teams will invariably have winning and losing streaks during the season.  This completely works against the sports talk format.  Sports talk is all about endlessly hyping upcoming events, endlessly analyzing those events, assigning blame and heaping praise afterward, and pronouncing trends from the smallest evidence.  The NFL gets the in depth coverage.  NBA coverage consists of talking about the Lakers and whoever the best player in the league is and only doing that for the entire season.  With baseball, you can’t quite get away with that.  Certainly they try.  Sports talk thinks that just mentioning the Yankees somehow constitutes worthwhile coverage.   

You can't really hype a daily event.  Baseball players who are goats one day, may be the hero the next.  A player hyped as the next big thing, enviably goes into a slump, or the team they play for will, negating their great performance.  A great baseball team will slump.  Even if they keep winning at a prodigious rate, after a couple of months, you can't keep on hyping them endlessly. 

Simply, cogent baseball talk, like on the MLB network, requires paying daily attention to the actual games and looking at them from an historical perspective.  General sports talk cannot do either reliably, which make them the perfect vehicle for the PGA, NBA, and the NFL (which is the ultimate in reality television, in that they don't use Writer's Guild screenwriters to script their events either). 

It could be worse.  I’m sure hockey fans would love to get baseball level coverage.  I don’t understand why hockey isn’t more popular.  It’s sport that can truly appeal to men and women.  They should adopt my motto: Hockey-Come for the fights, stay for the figure skating.