Coach_TV posted:If you look at the polling data a few thing jump out. It was conducted over the phone (landline and cell) between December 4 -11 which of course is in the middle of Football season and if I'm sitting in my living room watching a game and I answer my phone and asked which sport I like...well you see where I going here.
The previous poll was in June of 2013 and had baseball at 14%, football at 39% and basketball at 12%, same argument can be made with June being baseball season.
The other thing that caught my eye was this statement - Samples are weighted to correct for unequal selection probability, non-response, and double coverage of landline and cell users in the two sampling frames. What does that mean? Couple that with a 5% margin for error and the numbers probably are a little higher then reported.
Link to the polling data - http://news.gallup.com/file/po...64&g_medium=copy
This ^^^ probably had more than anything to do with the results than actual popularity. If you took a poll in the next few weeks you could get a lot of positive support for how great the Winter Olympics are then we forget about them for 4 years.
In my opinion baseball doesn't need to get gimmicky to keep fans. There is no need for a pitch clock, limiting mound visits,...etc. Baseball is best when the ball is put in play, work with the umpires to call a zone that forces hitters to swing. Start working to change the mentality of the 3 outcome hitters. You don't need to have HRs for baseball to be exciting but you do need action. It is hard to find a faster paced game than baseball when a ball is in play. For years there has been a lot of repeated rhetoric that baseball is slow and football is fly by the seat of your pants exciting. There have been multiple studies that show the NFL has more down time per game than MLB does. Replay has pretty much gutted the flow and watchability of an NFL game. I believe we have seen the peak of football popularity. MLB should not follow the NFL and should run away from replay. Say we tried it and didn't achieve the results we wanted. The only argument is we wan't to get all calls correct and this doesn't really happen. We often see using replay umpires get calls spectacularly wrong. Even with advanced technology these are human beings who make mistakes, I'd err on the side of a quicker call, have the officials make a call and move on with the game.
The NBA is probably the best athletic display of all sports but the product is devoid of the mass marketability to ever be number1.
Soccer is also a fairly high concussion sport and they will have their own issues once the NFL legal problems get rolling.