Sports Media Watch presents thoughts on recent events in the industry, starting with a look at how Major League Baseball and the NBA compare in ratings and media coverage at a time of transition for both.
One of the more interesting dichotomies in sports media is between the perceptions of the NBA and Major League Baseball, the two leagues out of the “Big Four” that are closest to each other in television viewership and total revenue. The NBA is endlessly discussed on sports talk shows, baseball is not. The NBA on Tuesday will begin the first season of an incredible $77 billion media rights deal, while MLB will consider it a success this year to scrounge up nine figures across the deals it is working on with ESPN, Netflix and NBC to replace ESPN’s expiring contract.
The NBA is young, baseball is old. The NBA is cool, baseball is old-school. And yet the World Series, which begins Friday, seems fairly likely to outdraw the NBA Finals for a second-straight year and the fourth time in the past six.
Of course, two of those years the NBA Finals was delayed due to COVID (the World Series never was). And one can go back just two years to find a Rangers-Diamondbacks World Series that ranks below any primetime NBA Finals outside of COVID. But still, winning four of the past six years would be the best stretch for the World Series versus the NBA Finals since it reeled off nine-straight from 1999 to 2007.
Now the championship series is not everything. The average NBA regular season game has more viewers than the average MLB regular season game. A strong League Championship Series audience is ho-hum for an NBA conference final game (that does tend to happen when you put LCS games on what is ultimately just Speed Channel). But as a general rule, the championship series audience tends to stand in for the health of a league. And by that standard, MLB has not just been right there with the NBA of late, it has been ahead.
Television ratings as a whole are not everything, especially in an era of ever-changing measurement and numbers that are increasingly difficult to put into any relevant context. But beyond the ratings, it is hard to ignore the plethora of storylines and stars in baseball the past two years, at a time when the NBA’s biggest stars are heading toward the end of their careers. Not just the obvious Yankees vs. Dodgers, but the number of young faces from Cal Raleigh to Pete Crow-Armstrong to Vlad Guerrero Jr., and of course the star of stars himself — Shohei Ohtani.
Start with Friday’s NLCS Game 4 and Ohtani’s historic performance. Ten strikeouts, three home runs — the type of night that one might have in MVP Baseball 2004 before losing interest because you made your create-a-player too good. What was perhaps most interesting about Ohtani’s performance, from a media perspective, was how uncontroversial it was.
One might ask why on earth an all-time great performance might be controversial. Because in the NBA, everything is debated. A night like Ohtani’s would be followed by a morning of heated debate. Perhaps because he was so dominant, there was no debate. On-air and online, there was no shortage of sentiment that it was the greatest performance in baseball history, and it was not uncommon to see Ohtani pronounced as the game’s greatest player — ever.
Baseball, of course, dates back to the 19th century. Unlike the NBA, where there is footage of every great player who ever played, there are baseball players we will never see. There are players whose greatness was so cemented that anyone who challenged them became the object of intense scorn — Roger Maris suffered for daring to hit 61 home runs. Henry Aaron suffered in so many more ways for hitting 715. But with Babe Ruth so far in the rearview mirror that his more ardent fans are no longer around to diminish all who came after him, it is possible to openly, unreservedly praise the greatest player in the game.
There was a time not too long ago when things were different. During the steroid era, greatness was not just contested, it was delegitimized with asterisk (also the tool of choice to diminish Maris, whose crime was not steroids but an expansion of the MLB schedule over which he had no control). Hall of Fame status became a hypothetical for the players who defined that era. Perhaps that was fair, perhaps it was not. But that is the point. It was a debate.
The time may never come when it is fully recognized just how corrosive ‘debate’ has been in sports and media. We are not talking about Lincoln-Douglas here, but daily, televised shouting matches that have elevated executives and talent who have built their careers purely on invective.
As baseball has become less of a ratings draw, as it has skewed older and at times faded from the national sporting consciousness, it has found itself outside of the debate cycle. It might come up every now and again, but in a half-hearted fashion that demonstrates just how little the participants are following the sport. The result is that you are allowed to enjoy the game, to enjoy the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle that is an Ohtani, that is a grand slam in the bottom of the eighth. For sports media’s ‘debaters,’ these are the kind of moments where you look for the losers, the goats — not the ‘GOATs,’ but the failures. You look for the places where even undeniable greatness is insufficient or compares unfavorably to the past.
Of course, nobody has to let their enjoyment of a game be impacted by what amounts to 30 Rock’s “Sports Shouting.” But realistically, negativity sells. It gets clicks. And in an online ecosystem where clicks are survival and survival is the only thing that matters, negativity becomes ubiquitous. Negativity, concentrated at high enough levels, has almost radioactive qualities. It seeps into the DNA, and eventually it creates something so toxic as to be intolerable.
So let’s consider the NBA.
The Number 23
NBC on Tuesday will carry an NBA game for the first time in 23 years. That, of course, is the most significant of all numbers in NBA history. It is the number Michael Jordan wore. It is the number LeBron James wears and the number of seasons he will have played once he steps onto the court this season. In those 23 seasons, James has been the primary focus of all NBA debates, and the primary source of fodder for those great ‘debaters.’ That has continued even as he moves into the final stage of his career.
Tuesday will mark the first season to open without James on the court since the 2002-03 campaign, and yet he was the main topic of conversation on Monday. To be sure, James does not shy away from the spotlight, and he has been known to create a self-serving newscycle out of whole cloth (“The Decision 2.0” recently caused a retirement stir, all in service of an ad for Hennessey). But the stories on Monday were clearly not promotional, instead unflattering. An article about Russell Westbrook not liking James for being “fake” and more to the point of this article, the latest provocations from Stephen A. Smith — who is still nursing a bruised ego after a hostile interaction with James ten months ago.
It is at this point that it should be pointed out that James, 40, is currently sidelined due to sciatica. He will probably play within the next month, but obviously once you have reached the sciatica stage, the exit sign is in sight. But as the NBA prepares to begin a new 11-year media rights deal on Tuesday — not just providing an excuse to shift focus from James but a necessity — it is James that was the focus, and as is usually the case, in a negative light.
There are two issues. First, the face of the NBA for the past 23 years is someone people get irrationally angry about. That is a problem. James is not totally innocent here — the genesis of all of this is the original “Decision” and “Not one, not two, not three,” and while one could make an argument that 15 years is more than enough time to get over it, that has evidently not occurred — but neither is he solely to blame. Unlike “The Decision 2.0,” James was not the one who made the day before the start of the season all about him.
There are surely those who will trip over themselves to say that James’ negative coverage is a result of his own failings. But then that brings up problem #2. If he is so personally problematic and inferior to past greats, then why is he so worthy of all this attention? That is the conflict his detractors tend to leave unresolved. This is an injured player on a team that has not been out of the first round of the playoffs in two years. He is not playing this week, and he is not playing this month. Perhaps it might be useful to turn your attention to the players and teams who will actually be competing to start the season.
Because criticizing a player you do not like — and who, again, is not playing for weeks — is apparently preferable to discussing actual basketball. If James’ fans all agreed that he isn’t as good as Jordan, that’s he’s not as good as Kobe, that he’s a bad teammate, a coach killer, and whatever else one wants to add, the debates would still continue in earnest. There would be no end to the argument, even if nobody was on the other side to argue on his behalf, because the argument is more fulfilling than the game.
If you are the type to find solitaire more compelling than the NBA Finals, it might be easier to talk about James than to feign interest in the defending champion Thunder or the challenger Rockets.
It is no secret that negativity has been a significant part of NBA media coverage of late, and new broadcast partners NBC and Amazon have taken up the mantle of reversing that trend. But it’s going to take more than John Tesh to fix it. (Considering that Smith used Carmelo Anthony — of NBC — as his sounding board, the new partners may have their work cut out for them.)
This used to be a problem in baseball. Barry Bonds was a lightning rod for open loathing in a way that was frankly uncomfortable, and he certainly had no problem reciprocating, at least to the media. Bonds and to a slightly lesser extent Alex Rodriguez were all-encompassing villains in MLB, and it was not good for the sport.
The toxicity of the steroid era was followed by a long stretch with no stars of note. MLB had excommunicated the huge personalities who drove its popularity in the 1990s and not replaced them with anyone who made a national impression. By the time Ohtani came around, MLB had largely fallen out of the national sports media consciousness.
The result was that Ohtani could develop almost under the radar, if that is possible for a player of his gifts. There have been many inane comments made about him during his career, but people are not driven to create news cycles about him to fill airtime. Even his dramatic free agency largely avoided the notice of the morning shows. The gambling scandal involving his interpreter might have tainted another athlete, but the Ohtani story has largely remained focused on the game, and almost entirely celebratory.
When Rob Manfred was trying to paint ESPN’s opt-out as mutual, one of his complaints was that MLB was hardly talked about on ESPN programming. That has been to the league’s benefit. MLB is not a constant source of conversation and debate, and it does not drive much engagement on social media. But the narrative about the game right now is largely positive. It is largely celebratory. And people are watching. In the biggest moments, more of them are watching nowadays than in the NBA’s biggest moments.
The saying ‘any publicity is good publicity’ is the type of thing one might hear from a Charlie Dixon, a Jamie Horowitz — one of those executives who helped create the embrace debate era in sports TV. It is an expression that can justify just about anything in the service of engagement. But no, not all publicity is good publicity.
When all is said and done, “$77 billion” is really all the NBA needs to say in order to win any argument about its status versus Major League Baseball when it comes to national media. It is hard to imagine MLB even sniffing that figure in its 2028 media rights deals, and it is worth remembering that the good feelings surrounding MLB could easily be wiped out by a prolonged work stoppage after next season.
But for now, for this particular moment, the feelings surrounding these two leagues are too different to ignore. The NBA has the money and the national attention. But as the saying goes, money can’t buy happiness. And when you contrast the feelings surrounding MLB this postseason to those which surround the NBA on the eve of its new season, the times just seem better at the ballpark than on the hardwood.
