One big change when producing sports copy on scheduled days for a newspaper in recent times is that the bosses would like to have your plan several days in advance. There will always be big events and breaking news, but there are times when the topic is not as clear-cut.
When asked about those days well in advance, my favored response for several decades, “God will provide,” will not cut it in the third decade of an amazing century that includes a new monster called AI champing at the bit.
Planning.
Which brings us to this offering, which was planned to be, “What has happened to big-league baseball that the World Series, formerly a national obsession, has been reduced to humiliations?”
Such as: bragging that Game 3 between the storied teams from North America’s largest cities, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, was able to produce slightly more viewers (over all “platforms”) than a nothing “Monday Night Football” game matching the lousy New York Giants and the boring Pittsburgh Steelers.
These were among the theories on the MLB’s decline:
• Big picture: Baseball became slower and slower (to the point a pitch clock was required) while society — the world, really — was moving faster and faster.
• Endless pitchers throwing at higher speeds, with greater varieties of pitches, made better in astounding ways (they show ‘em their skeletal movements), and with one main goal: Keep the ball out of the middle of the plate, where a hitter will wait four or five pitches without a hack in the hope of seeing one there.
