NFL: Why Football's Regular Season Trumps Baseball's Postseason

With all due respect to Nelson Cruz, baseball just doesn’t do it for me.

Some people enjoy baseball as a sport. I am not one of those people. But don’t get me wrong; I like baseball. I like going to games. I like sitting in the stands and losing track of whatever adversity I might be facing in life. But baseball—even in its postseason—just doesn’t have the same allure, the same gravitas as even a regular-season football game in Detroit.

I’m not the only one that feels this way. Nielsen ratings show the difference in television viewership between playoff baseball and October football. It’s undeniable: baseball ratings fluctuate with market size, series length and start times of the games in question. The NFL has no such issues. The league puts their game on, and the viewing public tunes in, almost wholly irrespective of who’s playing or when.

Why? Because the NFL is structured as an event. Nobody tailgates for baseball games, and really, we don’t feel like we should, because baseball is designed to fit into the crevasses of our lives. Football conversely, is designed to supersede them, and that works out because we usually have the day off anyway. Watching football on an autumn Sunday is just something that you do.

And if you miss a game, it’s fairly easy to get caught up on what happened with TV highlights. Sure, this is also the case with baseball, but baseball highlights are boring.

“Here is a diving catch.”

“Here is a double play.”

“Here is a ball flying over a fence.”

If you took five touchdown runs from any given Sunday, one could almost guarantee that each of them would be different. You’re not watching a ball fly around a baseball diamond. You’re watching a man run for his life. Almost every football highlight ends one of two ways: somebody scores or somebody gets drilled. And both of those types of moments have only gotten better over time.

And you always know when football is on TV. Baseball’s TV deals are weird. Playoff games could be starting at 3 o’clock or 10 o’clock, depending on the time zone and what other teams need to cram in their games so that the World Series doesn’t seep into November. But if you tune in at 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time to NBC on Sunday or ESPN on Monday, you know that football is waiting for you.

We heard a lot about that “great night of baseball” a couple weeks ago, where the Tampa Bay Rays and the St. Louis Cardinals qualified for the playoffs on the last night of the regular season. It was a genuinely exciting and dramatic moment...if you were able to watch both games at once, and if you were living outside of New York. You probably weren’t. One good night of action every six months doesn’t allow a sport to qualify as “interesting” in my view, especially if I have to follow two games to get the full effect.

I really don’t mean for this to sound so heavy-handed. After all, there’s no accounting for personal tastes, and yours might prefer the diamond over the gridiron. And you might even have some arguments for me as to why I’m an idiot and how dare I disrespect the national pastime and so forth, and I’d love to hear them. But the joy of fall Sundays tops everything for me. Even March Madness. Even the Stanley Cup Final. And even the MLB Playoffs.

And don’t even get me started on the NBA....