It’s a valid concern for baseball fans, and I think it’s one that deserves exploration.  I started responding in a comment on her blog, but I figured, why not transfer my thoughts here?

I actually think that the popularity of the Super Bowl as opposed to the World Series has less to do with the pure popularity of the sports, head-to-head, than with the concept of marketability.  There are a lot of things that postseason baseball is, but highly marketable is not one of them.  A few main points:

• Efficiency

One of the main reasons that postseason baseball isn’t super marketable is because it’s incredibly “inefficient” when compared to football.  With football, the playoffs are a one-and-done deal, and the Super Bowl is, as well.  There’s one game, and, when the clock runs out on that game, the Super Bowl is over.  No ifs, ands, or buts.  With the baseball postseason, the very least you could have in any long series is 4 games.  Personally, I love this about the baseball playoffs – more to savor – but the time-by-results efficiency simply isn’t there.

• Scheduling

Because of this lack of efficiency, we get scheduling problems that don’t apply to football.  The Super Bowl, being a one-and-done kind of thing, can be easily scheduled for the same time every year.  The fact that it is Super Bowl Sunday – not Tuesday, not Wednesday — lessens the impact of coast-to-coast time zones, because there is generally no school or work on Sunday regardless of whether it’s 3:30 or 6:30 PM.

Since baseball’s postseason series’ have an indeterminate amount of games, and uniformly too many to fit into a weekend, we get into the issue of maximizing viewer potential on weekdays.  Attempting to straddle the East Coast and West Coast markets on a weekday make for dinnertime starts on the West Coast (5 PM, still a bit early to be “prime time”) and 8 PM starts on the East Coast, which is all well and good for an hour or two-hour-long program, but baseball games, often running upwards of three and four hours, frequently stretch into the wee hours of the morning, Eastern Standard Time.

• Marketing/Advertising

Because of this sort of lose-lose scheduling conundrum, it’s really hard to market postseason baseball in the same way that football is marketed.  The “clash-of-the-Titans” element is frequently still there, although it’s less obvious than the standard QB-vs.-QB, but since series are scheduled all throughout the week and often at different times of the month year-to-year, it’s hard to establish the viewing routine necessary to cultivate a Super Bowl-like media/marketing following.  In turn, without the massive media response to an established “day,” it’s hard to get the kind of advertising response that the Super Bowl generates, in turn losing baseball another aspect of what makes the Super Bowl so popular (Super Bowl ads).

It seems to me that in terms of structure, football is simply better suited to being a “day.”  Football has a halftime, which lends itself to a highly marketable halftime show — football has a time clock, which means we have some clue as to when the game is going to end.  Without substantially changing the structure of baseball as we know it, it seems borderline impossible for the World Series to generate the kind of media hype and standard viewer following that the Super Bowl has.  Bottom line, I guess … baseball is much more of a time investment, which lends itself less well to being a marketing phenomenon, but is a blessing to those of us who count down the days to Spring Training every winter.

Till next time,

Ana

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