Baseball is faster and that's just a smart business move
How is this even a question?
I’m certainly not the first person to tell you that your attention is a premium product right now. Demand far outstrips supply.
Don’t believe me, go wherever it is you save things that seem interesting for later. For me, that’s dozens of movies and docs ‘liked’ on Netflix, Prime and the like. It’s podcasts I’ve subscribed to in order to be supportive, but probably will never listen to more than once, for five minutes, just to get a taste in case it comes up in conversation. It’s Twitter likes, or bookmarks or whatever, of articles I should read. And it’s browser tabs. Like, a metric ton of tabs every day. It’s 6 p.m. right now, and here we are:
If you’re at all Online, I don’t doubt your browser looks similar. But even so, I would be capable of working my way through my backlog, were it not for one thing: Sports.
If you don’t care about sports, fine. Good for you. You probably have some other passion that demands your attention more immediately than all the things you have saved for later. For me, as of roughly a week ago, every year, that thing is baseball.
It is ironic, like actually ironic, that someone who complains frequently about every movie that runs more than two hours, has this particular habit. To chain myself to a form of entertainment that could only hope to court a 2.5-hour runtime under the most ideal circumstances. But here we are. At least … until now!
If you haven’t heard, they fixed baseball. And that’s not an exaggeration. Through the first week of the season, the average time of a game is close to an actual two and a half hours. And it’s been the best thing to happen to my ability to a) accomplish other things, such as being a part of my family, and b) have some attention to spare for books, podcasts and the occasional show.
There has been some debate about the most famously non-clocked game in the world playing with a timer. Traditionalists don’t love it, though some of them are coming around. But this is not intended to be a treatise on the value To The Game of a pitch clock in baseball.
I write this to celebrate the most prominent instance I can think of in which a business built on attention—ratings, time spent, commercials, etc—dares to change to respect its users time.
Movies are longer. Often much longer. TV shows are longer, and often released all at once to encourage users to binge or be left behind. Podcasts … well, I love podcasts, but about 90 percent of them have an issue with wasting listeners’ time with lax editing. And there’s simply more digital content on social media than anyone could ever hope to consume. Even TikTok videos keep getting longer.
And in the middle of all of this, baseball —f**king ‘keep the 1930s records in place’ baseball!—is the business that has adapted. It’s stunning to me when I think about it. The number of hours the average fan spends watching their favourite team, no matter how diehard that fan might be, will drop this year. And it will be the absolute right move.
I cannot believe I am writing this, but modern media businesses could learn a lot from Major League Baseball. Respect people’s time. If you don’t, someone else will.