Baffoe: Baseball Actually Got Something Right
By Tim Baffoe--
(CBS) It will never be just right so long as Chris Berman is driving the broadcast with his turn signal on for the last 10 years. Still, Major League Baseball managed to make the Home Run Derby cool again Monday night.
Even as "Back, back, back, back, back" was both describing balls dying on the Cincinnati warning track when Boomer pretended to pay attention and suddenly his flaxen hairline by Trump, the audial pain was, for the first time in a long time, mitigated by actually compelling action on the field.
It's reflexive to be uncomfortable with rule changes in a sport as innately conservative as baseball. Replay has become somewhat less clunky since its installment, but there's still an artificial taste about it (especially if a call ends up going against your favorite team). The designated hitter is still an argument waiting to happen at the corner of Everytavern, USA. But with the game's equivalent of the increasingly stale NBA Slam Dunk Contest, something needed to be done.
Not done as in make an exhibition effect actual consequential baseball like, say, Tuesday night's All-Star Game determining home-field advantage in this year's World Series. Nothing baseball can do other than admitting its own stupidity and losing that rule can make up for that (or at the least, they could encourage managers manage the game in accordance with its supposed importance). I'm not sure the game is able to deal with its ego in that capacity quite yet.
The 2014 Home Run Derby had the lowest ratings since viewership numbers have been available, according to Sports Media Watch. Part of that was due to a rain delay but also contributing was apathy. Home run hitters taking batting practice? You don't say?
Kids' attention spans aren't fit for the pace of the traditional Derby, and we know they're already drifting away from baseball more and more altogether.
"If baseball does nothing, they'll probably stay flat for another 10 years," Rich Luker, a psychologist and sports researcher who has run ESPN's polling for two decades, told the Washington Post back in April. "But 20 years from now, they'll be moving to a secondary position in American life, doomed to irrelevance like Tower Records or Blockbuster Video."
Ask a high schooler if he or she even knows what Blockbuster Video is.
The Derby will always draw eyes for the mere fact that there's nothing else sporting on TV that night. Bad sports is better than no sports for many still, but the league and ESPN understood what they had wasn't enough.
Enter the clock to go with the a two-men-enter-one-man-leaves bracket. And then enter suspense. Enter drama. Enter the viewer's mouth getting gradually more agape as Josh Donaldson's timed total approaches Anthony Rizzo's while his or her eyes ping pong back and forth between the ticking and the swinging. There was feeling a bit more tightness in one's stomach watching Albert Pujols watching Joc Pederson on a TV from the locker room instead of relaxed on the field.
OK, this is different. This is more intense. This is — hey, baseball, I'm gonna say it — this is cool.
And even if it meant bringing pleasure to the crusty Brennaman family, the organic dance that occurred between the crowd at Great American Ballpark and Reds All-Star Todd Frazier was something special. Knowing the "hometown kid" narrative beforehand didn't diminish how neat it was as his performance unfolded and eventually culminated in winning the whole competition amid the repeated explosions of Cincinnati fans.
In the end, ratings for the Derby were up 26 percent from last year. A new idea from baseball actually worked for once.
Tuesday night will bring Pete Rose to the coverage of the All-Star Game on FOX, which will bring more eyes in the way we always like to gawk at the worst of humanity as well as see how awkward baseball's greatest living scourge can make its most self-celebratory night. Will the gambling be broached and how so? What's the over/under on Ray Fosse mentions? Can we get Bud Selig to crawl out from under the broadcast platform and swing a steel chair over Rose's back? How slimy can we make this sideshow?
Well, at least it won't involve Berman. And for 24 hours a baseball spectacle felt good again.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.
