Say, purely for the sake of argument, the rapture doesn’t go down (or up) on May 21 and the lot of us aren’t fighting locusts and the like.
It means we can get religious and talk NFL. Pretend negotiations don’t produce an agreement heading into training camps. Summer marks the beginning-of-the-end times for fall’s CBApacolypse, and it’s an existential crisis for sports fans across the country.
Can Major League Baseball seize the day?
The NFL has had two labor stoppages: one in 1982 when players went on strike demanding more of the revenue pie, and then again in 1987.
In 1982, more than half of the season was missed, and no games were played between Sept. 21 and Nov. 16.
In 1987, one week of football was missed and three weeks played, infamously, by the replacements, though “real” players returned in mid-October.
In 1982, when a portion of the NFL’s work stoppage coincided with the baseball season, MLB saw a near 50 percent attendance increase from 1981. Before you take that as evidence of the MLB‘s ability to capitalize, remember that the sport endured its own work stoppage in 1981, and the 1982 attendance mark was similar to that in 1980 and years ’83 through ’86.
In 1987 however, the sport saw a near 10 percent attendance increase as the specter of an NFL work stoppage positively affected both the dog-days and early fall for MLB.
The positive trend continued into the early ’90s, and gives precedent that baseball can take advantage of an NFL work stoppage. Conversely, we saw how a prolonged strike can poison perception for years.
MLB saw steady growth until the 1994 strike. There was an attendance drop of 20 million from 1993 to 1995 (from 70 to 50 million) after which the steroid era artificially inflated attendance until about 1999. Numbers have remained basically static, recession or boom, since.
As MLB knows all too well, an NFL (and to a much lesser extent an NBA) lockout could be the best thing for the sport since Jackie Robinson and post-war racial integration.
Someone is going to take advantage of the hundreds of millions of displaced fans, and with all due respect to bog snorkeling, baseball appears the prime candidate to capture the NFL’s long-held throne.
Times are a little different from 1987. Sure, celebrities still “bang seven gram rocks,” but the new crack is the keyboard.
Charlie Sheen, on his mercury surfboard, proves even extra-planetary broadcasts can create a media tsunami. As much as the Sheen spectacle compels me in this very column, and most of the shameless “media” (a term that doesn’t make sense anymore), and really everyone, into immediately regurgitating the new lexicon and spreading memes, it’s not what baseball needs.
With the NFL quagmire, MLB doesn’t need an injection of Tiger’s blood, or even a negative public relations campaign, to come out bi-winning.
While the entirety of the “negotiation process” won’t be intently followed by the NFL fan base, if (when) things get ugly late in the summer, you can be sure to see, hear and redistribute plenty of quotable fodder from both sides, with negative exposure lasting weeks and months.
We’ll see just how strong our addiction is to the gladiator sport after the league turns its back on us — at the pinnacle of its existence and popularity no less.
In the information and social networking era, critical mass can be reached seemingly overnight — good, bad or indifferent. Years of equity are squandered in an instant, transferred to an alternative.
MLB won’t have to do a thing but sit back and let it do what it does best — playoff race. How many lost NFL fans become new MLB fans? There’s plenty of good stars and luckily, enough competitive balance (for MLB standards) between small, medium and large markets where geographic regions aren’t frozen out of the paradigm shift.
That’s something even a warlock from Mars couldn’t screw-up.
Reach the columnist at nick.ruland@asu.edu
