Ryan Glasspiegel: MLB vs. NBA

Welcome to the house of Strauss.

Yeah, go for it.

Stars hang with stars.

Winners hang with winners.

It's house of Strauss.

We are joined by Ryan Glass-Fegel, the greatest sports media reporter in all the land.

It is boiling hot all of a sudden in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But that's no excuse for whatever hair brain takes.

I might unleash out there.

We were just talking a little bit backstage about how cushy the situation the San Francisco Giants have.

I might reserve that take for later.

And we're going to be getting into a few, a few hobby horses, Ryan.

We've got the world baseball classic going on, coming to a finale.

And it's provoked a lot of people do echo a take you've had from years ago.

You might have been early about whether the MLB has overtaken the NBA.

We've also got Ryan, who's going to present a theory about why college basketball might be struggling currently.

We might talk about bias in the media.

We might talk about the war, though I think Ryan will probably want to avoid that.

I might drag him into it.

But let's start with the main event, Ryan.

The main event, the world baseball classic, all this buzz, all this excitement.

Some controversy has people resuscitating not just the classic worrying about the NBA,

but the wondering of boring, old, gray, white, stodgy baseball has gained on cool, young, diverse basketball.

How could it be?

Yes, this has been one of my pet causes for probably six or seven years.

It wasn't necessarily that MLB was more popular than the NBA at that point,

but at least that it was like a closer debate than warranted discussion out.

Like if you can even go a little bit further back, if you go back about 10 years,

Ethan, during the great warriors versus LeBron rivalry,

it's split across multiple teams, but with LeBron.

But there was like, oh, is NBA going to gain on the NFL?

Is NBA going to overtake the NFL?

Not only is that not happening.

I mean, the NFL just doubled triple quadruple down on their dominance.

Stole Christmas day from the NBA, punched them in the stomach and said, give me your lunch money.

Yeah.

But baseball, though, has been catching it from behind for the last 10 years,

and maybe he's surprising.

I don't know what you're laughing, but...

Catching it from behind was my immature provocation, and that's why.

I didn't know where you were going exactly until you'd completed the sentence, but continue.

So, I mean, the evidence for this...

So first, let's point out what the NBA has in its favor,

so people just don't think we're a couple of haters.

The NBA has a far bigger national TV deal.

Adam Silver, as we've talked about a number of times, really played that hand perfectly.

I don't think he had pocket aces, but he played, you know, pocket jacks into an enormous windfall.

And he did that by basically having three bitters in Amazon, NBC, and TNT for two spots in a game of musical chairs.

And really pushed Amazon and NBC up to huge numbers, also ESPN.

But, you know, NBC came out of nowhere and is paying them, you know, almost $3 billion a year.

The NBA on social media is way, way, way further than MLB.

And anytime I make this argument about MLB being more popular, I get told to look up all the stars from each league on Instagram

and just see how much the NBA dominates, you know, NBA dominates YouTube compared to MLB.

Just digitally in this digital world where it doesn't count necessarily if you watch the game, like on TV or go to it,

then like these little snippet highlights, the NBA dominates MLB with those.

And their players are more recognizable, more household names.

But I would argue though that MLB is much more, not much more, but more popular than an NBA and things that people don't think about as much.

It's like local ratings.

So in 2020 when I was at the big lead, I did a thing on all the local ratings and MLB and NBA.

So I don't know what they look like exactly right now, but I imagine the pattern is mimicked what has happened with the big national games.

But in any event, in a vast majority of the cities that had both NBA and MLB, more people watch MLB per game in those cities and there's twice as many games.

You look at attendance.

It's like one and a half times as many people go to an MLB game as an average NBA game and there's twice as many games.

You're like, well, the NBA aren't as big as the MLB stadiums.

Well, you don't think if they could sell 35,000 tickets, they wouldn't have bigger arenas.

Like, look, I get it.

That like baseball is like an advantage where you, if you're sitting further away, you're not as just removed from having any good sight line on the actual though.

I would argue some of these upper deck seats, you are that far removed and people go anyway because you like sitting outside and having auto going to beer and being apart.

But they don't have that in the NBA.

They don't even like other than at the final four where they hold them in these cavernous football stadiums.

We don't get to see what it would look like to have an NBA game in like a 35 40 45,000 person venue.

We do occasionally the Alamo dome in San Antonio will have one of these events where it's over 68,000 people.

I do think this is one of these.

We're just used to doing things a certain way because the NBA court is smaller.

It's just a more intimate setting, but I could probably pretty easily watch an NBA game from farther away and these crowd capacities could be enhanced.

We're just used to doing it a certain way, but I continue, continue the argument, sir.

Like local ratings, the MLB beats the NBA pretty hand away per game and there's so many games attendance.

They beat the NBA hand away.

There's twice as many games.

Now, I will say that the NBA fan base that goes to games is more affluent than the MLB fan base.

And I don't think that that's necessarily what people would expect because you think of baseball.

You stick old white and rich. You think of NBA.

I don't think those are the first things that come to your mind.

Well, it didn't used to until the Warriors moved to the chase center and that changed my perception.

But continue, sir.

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's what that's what I'm talking about, though.

Like the amount that people pay for lower level between the baskets for NBA teams.

Like it's corporate buyers. It's the super wealthy.

They're making a fortune on those sales.

But we're not arguing like who makes more money or who has richer fans.

We're arguing about who has more fans.

And much more people engage with a live MLB product in person over the course of a year than NBA and buy substantial margin.

Probably millions of people.

And so there's that.

And then, you know, you've written about this a number of times.

The World Series has surpassed the NBA finals in viewership almost every year for the past decade at this point.

And that is inverted from what it was like the decade before that.

So why don't you go into those numbers?

Yeah, nine of 10.

We had a stretch of nine of 10 NBA finals being more viewed than the comparable World Series to that year.

The only exception was that absolutely historic, crazy Cubs versus Indians, seven gamer.

I mean, that's a once in a lifetime kind of World Series.

So it was just expected.

And one of my frustrations with life Ryan as a get older is just how quickly people will retcon the past

to make sense of surprises and act as though it was always thus.

When I was covering the NBA.

It was just assumed that the NBA finals were a bigger deal than the World Series.

And that advantage would continue because the dominant narrative about baseball was old,

dying.

We were fast forwarding through its doom.

Apparently it's got a little bit of the mark Twain.

The numbers of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

But that was the assumption.

And now that it's a bit of a fair fight between World Series and NBA.

I don't think all the Dodgers are always in it.

It's a gap.

Yeah.

Part of the sport.

Exactly.

That's the next point.

You've got a sport.

They might ruin it with this upcoming strike.

They might do what the NBA did and go the way of parody.

But their structure is built for a familiar brand with a lot of money to press an advantage.

And it turns out people like that.

They say they want parody.

But they want familiarity.

And yes, they say so as well.

I have to take down like everyone talks about how the Dodgers were just this inevitability.

And it seems like that in retrospect.

But they were had their backs against the walls against the blue jays in that World Series.

If the blue jays win, I don't know if we're having some of the same like discussions right now

about how the Dodgers are inevitable.

I mean, they, the Dodgers really had to claw back in that series on multiple options to win.

If pot, if pot has drops that ball when he's getting crashed into or crashing into his teammate

is more accurate than they lose.

So there's a lot of randomness in the baseball.

Yeah.

It wasn't the random players making big plays too.

Like, yeah, we obviously, everybody knows about Otani, Betts and Freeman.

But it was the people in the bottom of their depth chart who were like making huge hits and defensive plays

that the one you just talked about.

So it's a baseball is a peculiar beast in that way.

And like, that's the thing is that just based on their resource advantages,

you can bet that nearly all on an annual basis of the Dodgers Yankees,

Betts, Red Sox, Cubs are going to be in the mix at Philly's too.

So you got like these big market teams that are, look, even if they're like the Yankees

have a one-o-world series since 2009, but they make it to the playoffs.

I think every year maybe it but once and so.

It's the familiar brands are there late in a way that the NBA doesn't account for

that in its current.

Well, the NBA used to have it.

The NBA used to have it.

They've disrupted it.

The Denver Nuggets are the first team to really feel the sting of it,

where that's an exciting team, a small market team.

But they had to disrupt the core.

It's harder to keep a core together now in the NBA.

And we're going to have to grab a with that too, although they have a thousand draft picks.

So they're doing a smart, a smart job playing it.

I would say to, it's a really hard argument to settle.

Here's how I'd frame it.

There was a time when a lot of influencers on YouTube scammy financial types who are trying

to give you these get rich quick messages and a crew attention that way.

They would talk about active income versus passive income because they were trying to sell you a dream

that you could make passive income that would flow into your coffers because you own real estate.

And then the active income is the income you really work hard for.

I would say in terms of the, in terms of the attention economy,

I think the NBA is dominating with passive attention.

Those highlights on social media that's a passive experience.

You could make the argument that watching a game on TV is passive,

but I would disagree.

You've got to sit down.

You've got to ex out that time.

And you've got to watch your local game on television.

And so that's active attention right there when you're doing that.

Going to a game that is quite active, that is active attention.

So the social media stuff that's that's coming passively, the NBA big advantage,

the active harder kind of attention, that's what the NLB is going for if I'm to oversimplify a distinction.

Yeah, no, I agree with you on that.

I also have like a take that I've been working on that I haven't delivered in public,

even on Twitter yet.

And that is.

So Rob Manfred has this reputation as like a dower guy.

Like, you know, when when they were talking about baseball during the pandemic,

and it was like taking until forever for the game to come back,

he sounded almost like that McDonald's CEO talking about the burger as a product.

You know, he sounded like the world series trophy is just a piece of metal.

Like it's so he's got this like reputation as, you know, negative fan anti fan guy.

He has been the best commissioner for the fans of the sport of any of the four in the last half decade

because they he went and he changed the rules, getting rid of the shift,

adding the pitch clock, having these reliever rules that have objectively made the game

a lot more enjoyable to watch.

Like I don't think like, you know, he had a lot of critics when he was doing this by the way.

People are like, oh, well, just hit it where they're not.

But no, he stepped in there's base runners again.

And that's like the NBA hasn't taken a step like that to improve the aesthetics of their game

and make it so it's not just a bunch of threes and layups.

Like they they they haven't legislated the mid range jumper back into the game.

Like baseball did with like pulling the ball by banning the shift.

I loved the band the shift.

I wrote about it at the time.

They did a great job with the advertisement showing the rule changes to narrated by Brian Cranston.

Tagline was something like it's the greatest game in the world.

Now it's even better.

That's fantastic advertising.

And I felt similarly when the people would argue against it.

Yeah, that sounds great in theory, but hitting a baseball is one of the hardest things to do in the world.

And it's pretty much impossible in many instances to just direct it to a different way completely.

And if those adjustments were possible, then the shifts wouldn't happen.

The shifts kept happening.

What I loved about banning the shift is it returned the game to something that was visually familiar to me.

I did not love when somebody would smash.

What always was a hit my entire life.

And because they had figured out the analytics, there are two guys right there and the guy catches the ball.

I know like right Adam.

Yeah, I don't, I didn't like it.

And so you can just do things, folks.

They banned it.

And how many people miss it?

How many people miss the shift?

I don't know a lot of people who are bemoaning the lack of a shift and wanting it back.

It's good that it's gone.

Or a limited reliever changes or, you know, taking 30 seconds to throw a pitch over and over and over and making a game take over four hours.

I mean, I kind of miss longer games actually, but I think that for like the vast majority of the public, it made things better.

It's made things a lot better.

There are still challenges.

I think we're at war with optimization.

We're at war with smart people figuring out ways to make the game unrecognizable and find glitches within it.

I don't love all the pitching changes that they have right now.

And it's hard because you're going to risk injury.

If you force a starter to pitch for longer, but I do think it's a problem.

If teams don't have their horse and don't have a starter, and it's just a cycle of a bunch of guys.

And similarly, as I've talked about Steve Koon of sports predict, he's really big on teams and basketball should just cycle guys in and out constantly and play a full 12 man rotation and press and all.

He could be totally right.

That's not what people want basketball to be.

Want to be right, your horse.

Yeah, that's what they want.

So you've got to figure it out.

Go ahead.

Well, I was just going to say that credit to manfred and credit to the nerds who fight the nerds because I might have been a little nerd critical saying that perhaps the nerds ruined basketball.

You know what this reminds me of.

Did you see true detective season one, Ryan?

Did you see that?

I remember McConaughey says the world needs bad men, Marty.

We keep the other bad men from the door.

The world needs nerdy men, Ryan.

They keep the other nerdy men from ruining sports.

They

Yeah.

I was brought the O.F. scene was, you know, played a big part of the analytics, ruining it to fix it. It was almost like the casino hiring X Blackjack cheats.

I don't want to say, and this is a little bit of a pivot, but Ross Barcan, the writer and he's a listener of ours, brought this debate back.

We've had it several times, long time listeners in this show probably remember it, but he was the one who tweeted about it and got Ethan writing about it.

He was nice enough to tag me, get me about 100 new followers.

And he did that in the context, which we haven't even talked about of the world baseball classic, which has just been electric.

Yes.

And I saw somebody saved Barcan.

He was Kendall Baker.

Oh, it's easy to get caught up prisoner of the moment in sports greatest peaks to the responses.

Well, baseball gets credit for inventing that.

They invented this peak.

They originated the world baseball classic.

It was nothing.

It was an idea.

And now it's a major sport idea that got shit on for 10 or 15 years, too.

Like now it's finally like this is basically like a man who's 30 and they're like, why are you planting trees?

Like we have a bunch of trees.

This is stupid.

And then it grows into like a little tree and you're like, well, whatever it is that little tree do for you.

And now it's just like big apple tree that you take every three years and bite in the apple.

This is delicious.

You know what happened to the NBA?

They planted one of those trees in China.

And then one day she just chopped it down.

That's that's what happened to the NBA.

Their investments were external.

And that's been part of the conversation to in this comparison is well, the NBA global, global, global, global, global.

I don't really know how to weigh any of that.

It's hard to economically appropriate global.

It's almost like when they say there's this country they've got all the oil in the world.

And but the oil is really sloppy and it's really deep down there.

And nobody knows how to get it.

That's how I feel sometimes when we have these conversations about the NBA and global popularity.

Well, mainly laugh when he said the NBA planted trees with aspiration.

Oh, reference.

Yeah, I mean, MLB also doesn't get credit for like its globalization.

I mean, first of all, Japan, the people there seem to enjoy baseball quite a lot.

And like they've been involved their crowds in this world baseball classic.

And they've supplied a lot of like very, very good players to MLB.

And then, you know, the Latin America, that just gets glossed over.

Like we think that like Venezuela and Dominican Republic and stuff, like, I don't know, are they global?

Like they seem to be quite into baseball.

So like you see them.

That's like with the secret sauce of the world baseball classic is like these Dominican and Venezuelan fans

that have just been packing the games and like Miami or I don't know if they had a game in Houston.

But like their point, they're bidding the prices up.

And just those crap like wait, this is something we learned during the pandemic,

which is that like the crowds in sports are a bigger part of the TV show than they've ever been, you know, legitimately given credit for.

And these crowds, the world baseball classic are unbelievable.

I can't remember the time we saw an NBA crowd like what we've seen with these Venezuelan and Dominican crowds at the WBC over the last couple weeks.

Yeah, I might, I probably have to go back pre pandemic.

I probably have to go back to, I thought kind of hate giving the Canadians credit, but that some of those raptors playoff runs five to 10 years ago.

They were really finding an identity for themselves and acting as a rockest crowd.

And now there's this whole discourse.

I'm not sure if you've seen it of fans, bloggers, media talking about how great these crowds.

The Latin flair of these crowds, but not just the crowds, but the players have the players celebrate.

And the team you always say is so dour and stodgy.

And have you seen any of this discourse about?

I'm sure I can imagine like the avatars of the people tweeting it.

But I haven't seen it.

It is, it is your algorithm, but not mine.

It's hit my algorithm to a degree.

And that's just because of Andy Lou Lightyear's co-host has really been fixated on this.

And I don't know how much of that is real.

I almost feel like that.

I mean, you're already wearing your tweets with other people.

Has has what?

Who?

Have you seen one of these tweets of like the negative activity about America and like not celebrating enough and then shared it?

Because when you do that, all of a sudden it just serves you a heaping portion of them.

Oh, I don't believe I did that.

I've seen plenty of that.

But I saw way more of though was the controversy following the strike call of the Mason Miller pitch in the fantastic USA Dominican Republic game.

And all the discourse following that that, hey, it should have been called a ball.

And yet I believe Ryan that fixating on it.

Traderous.

Traderous.

Traderous for the American sports journalist to fixate too much of that.

I don't think anything like that is going to happen again except for maybe night because.

Or maybe this on a Tuesday before the finals.

It's probably going to get released right into it.

But the like the replay review for balls and strikes is coming.

This year in MLB.

Why do we need replay review if we're going to automate the automate.

I don't understand that.

Yeah.

I mean, they're splitting the baby.

They're also going to be there.

But there's going to be challenges for balls and strikes that are by robot.

I don't have a problem with that strike call by the way.

I know you could call me a biased American.

I would have a problem with it if I was a Dominican fan to be sure.

But I think there's this overreaction when we see slow motion and we see the box.

If we didn't have the box there.

If we had watched that happen pre box like when we watched baseball growing up.

That thing from Miller.

That fell off the table.

That was in the zone 95% of the way.

We're very critical of these umpires when we go.

I know.

It's very hard too.

It's like umpiring balls and strikes like I did it in little weeks.

So I actually like I'm.

You know, obviously I don't know what it's like to do in a MLB level or even close.

But I am sympathetic to that position is very hard job.

Nobody threw it 89 mile an hour sliders when you were watching.

No, that Miller pitch was 89 mile an hour slider.

He's throwing over 100 miles an hour.

He's tumbling the pitches.

That pitch looked like the fastballs.

It was an incredible pitch.

I don't know how it was taken.

That's also an incredible take.

But in real time.

That's a tenth of a second dip.

And then when you look at it on your little app and it has it in the box.

Then you could complain about it.

But I saw that one as it's real easy and retrospect with the box helping us.

But in real time when that's you making the call, I don't think it's that easy.

And it was closer to a strike than it was made out to be all fair points.

I don't know if I can dispute any of that.

I know.

It's just my patriotism coming out.

Actually, it's not quite that I've been contrarian patriot right now because watching some

of the sports journalists seemingly root soft root against the MLB.

And you told me you weren't seeing this, but to me it's more palpable.

That is that is sucked me in.

I'm not usually a patriotic viewer or an Olympic guy.

But now it's just to watch them absorb all of that and hopefully bless me content wise

with whatever phone call Donald Trump is going to resolve if the team USA actually wins it.

Now I just root for angst and I root for content.

Yeah, where we might get a repeat of that tonight.

I noticed it more as going to say in the aftermath of the hockey especially after the cash

Patel visit and the Trump all and the joke controversy about like inviting the women when

like hijacked like a week of the news cycle basically.

So God, there was a lot going on in retrospect with that.

It's not going to be like the hockey thing.

The hockey thing, the whole cash, but like you said, just all those different elements.

The women's team joke, the cash Patel, the Canadians and how they have an impact on our discourse

and they've got their weird energy.

I actually think it's going to be fairly muted whatever happens and they could lose.

We don't know.

You can be listening right now and you know the result.

That makes you more special than Ryan and I.

We don't know the result.

You are from the future.

We are from the past.

So I've loved it though.

It's been a fantastic event and I think it's a testament to how with creativity and vision

and a little bit of patience, you can improve your sport.

You don't have to just be resigned to the dustbin of history.

So many of these arguments are fatalistic and it's baseball can't compete.

There's no way it's dying.

Well, I'm not saying that it's on the upswing.

It's on the upswing relative to the NBA and it did things to accomplish that.

I see these arguments in the Hollywood realm where we had the Oscars recently and it's no.

It's not the ideological capture of these institutions that have anything to do

with the way that they fall out of favor with the mainstream.

It's all technological.

Well, I think technological that says huge aspect might be the biggest aspect of what's happened

and how people don't go to the movies anymore.

But unless you're willing to actually sit and try to save yourself,

we have no idea whether it would have even been possible.

And with some of these institutions, some of these entertainment forms, they didn't.

So we don't.

And I think it's just too easy and fatalistic to say it was all technology and attention spans

and there was never any other way.

They also go out of their way to like nominate stuff that the public doesn't care about at all.

Like, you know, sinners didn't have like any idea of going to see that movie.

I think sinners would be more on the popularity.

Sinners is unusual in how popular it was.

Relative to some of the movies they've picked and reached out.

The show is how I'm a death I am on movie.

Well, I mean, look, I didn't see it.

I just know some people who went and sought and I thought that that

Rocky road to double in rendition they did was a pretty good tune.

And that's about all my opinions on the matter.

But yeah, they tend to go for what people don't want.

And you have to wonder how much money they've left on the table while dying,

cheerly out of peak and just being out to lunch and not having a conception of trying to

serve the American public interest.

And I don't think it's all about chasing you.