Miami Marlins president David Samson may have gotten booted off Survivor immediately for being a jerk and an incompetent manager, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop entertaining the people of America. Witness:
Win or lose, he wants the Marlins to do it faster this year.
“Pace of game is about our fans,” Samson said. “It’s very much a TV issue and an in-game-experience issue. No one is complaining about pace of game where it goes 12 innings and it’s 3 hours and 20 minutes and it’s a 5-4 game. That’s not the issue. If it’s a 3-1 nine-inning game that goes 3 hours and 12 minutes, that’s not enjoyable.”
The obvious jokes aside (the Marlins have certainly assembled a lineup that doesn’t interrupt the game with such distractions as baserunners), it’s amusing to hear Samson worrying about the in-game experience when this is the guy who had fans ejected for bringing signs to the game. But I suppose it’s easier to blame game length for your horrible attendance than your having traded off any talented players or having built a crazy-expensive stadium at taxpayer expense that boasts as its main claim to fame an award for excellence in drywall.
Not only can’t I believe they kicked this guy off Survivor, I can’t believe they didn’t give him his own reality show. Oh wait, they did.
That’s all on Selig for the pace of the game. You need shorter TV commercial breaks (it will never happen), you need rules like the batter staying in the box & the pitcher on the mound for the whole at-bat (it will never happen), a bigger strike zone (it will never happen because people like offense & steroid-fueled home runs by gym rats), coaches obsessed with pitch counts & every batter going deep into counts. Also, the other 29 owners will do nothing about it because the longer people are in the stadium, the more they will likely buy concessions & merchandise. So hence, it will never happen.
It’s just a different game now & that’s why it’s insufferable to watch in person.
@mp34
The same could be said for football. If not at the top, near the top in terms of ticket prices is the cost to attend an NFL game, and then when you are there, it is insufferable the amount of TV time-outs delaying the action/ball in play.
If there is a sport made for TV, it has to be the NFL.
Game length doesn’t seem to be a problem for the top half of the league that draws an average of 30k fans a game 81 times a year. Maybe it’s something else.
Samson/Loria are a joke and the punchline are the sheep who willingly hand over dollars into their oily hands.
Deelron;
People may not be staying away from the park for those now so common 4+hr yankees-redsox tilts, but frankly, it’s hard to stay engaged even for long time baseball fans if these aren’t “your” teams.
The game does have rules about pace of play, and I’d like to see them followed (if not tightened up as well).
Dan/MP34, I think you are both right… part of the reason that the NFL and MLB have become such TV revenue hogs is that both prostrate themselves totally to the advertising dollar – especially where tv is concerned. Believe it or not, the NFL didn’t used to take a commercial break between touchdowns and PATs, then another before the kickoff, then another after the kickoff, and then have an opportunity for another when the offense is so thoroughly out of sync after the commercial breaks that they have to call time out before their first down play…
As for baseball, well, it’s always had those 18 guaranteed inning breaks, along with new pitchers and the odd double switch etc.
Yessir, both sports just tailor made for selling crap to fools. And we must be some fools, cos they just keep increasing the selling and decreasing the entertainment… and now, we even pay for the channels that sell us all that crap!!! Seriously, how stupid are we????
Clearly Samson was miscast if they put him on the brains team…
Baseball has always had inning breaks, but they have gotten *way* longer thanks to commercial time. If you watch old broadcasts of, say, games from the 1950s, you’ll be amazed at how each team just ran on and off the field and got ready immediately for the next inning.
I wonder, has anyone calculated yet how much the new replay rules have added to average time of spring training games? Seems like this could be the worst thing for game length since the invention of Tony LaRussa…
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that even if they played nine innings in two hours or less, the Marlins STILL wouldn’t draw because (ready now?) Miami is and always has been a crummy baseball city when it comes to people attending games. I’ll even take it a step further and extend that analysis to the entire state of Florida: If you’re looking for baseball players, not a problem. If you’re looking for baseball fans, however? They’re all watching football or NASCAR. After spring training ends and all the tourists head back home, baseball as a spectator sport in Florida is essentially dead.
Gotta pay for those $500K minimums on the bench/bullpens and still make a profit. No surprise that TV – MLB’s biggest biz partner has to squeeze in as many ad’s as possible to pay for the outrageous deals with franchises and MLB. Bud-the-grease places a premium on industrial peace with the players union – that comes at a price in both time and the cost of following the product. Bud counts on the sheep following and paying, Bahh-bahh-bahh…