Football Bigger Than Baseball? Who Cares – Wall Street Journal

Updated Oct. 18, 2015 5:44 p.m. ET

It’s verging on late October, and you can count on three things happening in late October:

1. At least two people from work will start wearing tweed vests to the office and talk loudly about apple-picking adventures.

2. You will reach your limit on pumpkin spice everything.

3. Baseball fans will be deluged by the true but banal observation that the sport’s postseason TV ratings are body-slammed by football’s.

On the latter, you know what I mean. Stuff like:

Oh man, did you see the TV ratings from last night? Eleven people watched baseball, and eighty-nine million watched the Houston Texans break down cardboard boxes outside a Walgreens. Or maybe that was the Jaguars.

This information is typically presented to a pair of intertwined points:

A. Football rules the universe no matter how terrible the game is.

B. Baseball is about to be surpassed in popularity by chicken badminton and/or donkey chess, and if it doesn’t shorten games from nine to three innings, turn home plate into an iPad and let outfielders use hoverboards to deliver pizza, it will lose all of its audience under the age of 90 and be relegated to the American Museum of Stuff We Used to Care About, like DVDs and being civil to people on the Internet.

A plea here: Can we stop making value judgments about sports on the basis of their television numbers? I admit that said numbers are startling, and do reflect football’s grip on the country (not to mention the seductive mitts of gambl…I mean daily fantasy), but it’s silly to use the Nielsens to diminish a sport. Football’s huge. HUGE! We all get it. If Bruce Springsteen started traveling around and playing people’s backyards, there would be some folks who’d look outside and see Bruce singing “Thunder Road” and still choose to stay in the den and watch the Atlanta Falcons rake leaves in the Georgia Dome.

Whatever.

Ask yourself: Does its comparable lack of television popularity really take away from any of baseball’s joy? If you watched that bizarre seventh inning last week between the Rangers and Blue Jays—capped by Jose Bautista’s home run bat flip which looked like he was flinging a wine bottle onto a cruise ship—did any part of you, at any moment, think: My personal entertainment of this moment will be devalued if this game doesn’t do at least an 11.0 in the 18-34 demographic?

No, you did not. (If you said yes, congrats: you are a television executive.)

If you watched the Mets sink the Dodgers in the NLDS Game 5—a do-or-die contest that was actually up against the NFL amuse-bouche of Thursday Night Football, did you feel as if you were listening to some obscure Berlin art rock as the rest of the nation locked hands to the mainstream-pleasing melodies of Taylor Swift?

No, you did not.

The focus on sports TV numbers feels like an outgrowth of Box Office Obsession, in which everyday America follows the movie gate like studio chieftains and assigns greatness to any talking robot movie which can haul in $80 million domestically on opening weekend. The NFL is the sports version of a talking robot movie. It’s a talking robot movie with Roger Goodell, DraftKings and Vin Diesel.

There are plenty of legitimate concerns for baseball’s future—this summer the Journal’s Brian Costa detailed the worrisome numbers of kids abandoning the sport—but if you turn on the pro stuff right now, it’s hard to complain: real drama, packed stadiums, the freakin’ Cubs, Daniel Murphy transmogrified into Mickey Mantle. Regular-season football, conversely, is erratic. Sometimes you get quality stuff. Sometimes you get Broncos-Browns.

For the numbers, it doesn’t matter. Sunday Night Football this week featured the New England Patriots versus Indianapolis in Super Bowl PSI as the Mets hosted the Cubs for Game 2 of the NLCS. When the ratings arrive Monday, you can be certain football will stomp the action from New York.

Whatever.

It’s interesting. But it isn’t everything. Enjoy the talking robots…and also the baseball.

The Jets are 4-1. I got nothing. I am not yet prepared to live in a world in which the Jets aren’t a reliable source of humor. It’s like waking up one day and finding out it’s fun to go to the airport.

There are seven million people in the Journal sports department who attended the University of Michigan. That might sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. It’s a full seven million. The whole place is teeming with Wolverines, and they’re very clubby. They wear blue and maize T-shirts underneath their work clothes and have elaborate secret handshakes and private parties in the Hamptons to which they don’t invite me, a lowly University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate, or the Journal’s investigative sports reporter, Sharon Terlep, who graduated from Michigan State.

You might think being surrounded by Wolverines would make me feel a touch of Schadenfreude, even glee, when Michigan lost in the final seconds Saturday on a botched punt, a shocking end, but I don’t. I feel horrible for everyone involved, except for, of course, Michigan State, which must be truly psyched. I loathe the social media rage (and threats) directed at Wolverine punter Blake O’Neill—an unpaid student, let’s point out, uncynically—and the whole aftermath just gave me an icky feeling. When I watch a moment like that unfold, I cannot relate to the Spartan players who so successfully rushed the line, and especially Jalen Watts-Jackson, who recovered the fumble and brilliantly broke away down the field to score (and fractured his hip in the process.) No, I relate to the punter—placid and prepared one moment, panicked the next, watching his job’s biggest nightmare unfold in real time. Not only that: he’s got to watch it on TV for the rest of his life. Ten seconds, now here for an eternity.

But that is a fallible human I can absolutely imagine myself being. Perfection is beautiful in sports, but mistakes and misjudgments are also a fundamental part of the experience. Only a fool would suggest otherwise; only the contemptible would make a threat. O’Neill is my new favorite player in college football, and I am wishing him the best.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com