IMPO

As a lover of all things competitive and athletic, I have a very high opinion of sports and their role in society and, well, my life. As I laid down and opened my new issue of "Sports Illustrated", I happened upon a chart. As anyone in modern journalism knows, charts and graphs and interactive images draw in readers so of course i took the bait and began examining the chart. The chart illustrates the trend of sports viewers when it comes to televised sports focused on age. The charts lists about 20 different sports and then finds the median age of viewers of the sports in 2000, 2006, and 2016. The trend is visible. In all but one of the sports listed, the median age increased. For some sports it increased by quite a bit. In 2000, the NHL had viewers around 33 years old. Now that median age has risen to 49. A change in 16 years. Interesting because the two stats were taken 16 years apart from each other. Other increases were rather small. The NBA median age of viewers ...

The MLB front office has been trying to figure out how to make the game more fun for the fans. A lot of their focus has been trying to change the pace of the game. Ya know, make it go faster for the ADD generation. I think a possible solution has been found...and it has nothing to do with the MLB organization nor the pace of the game. To judge what a good solution could be we have to figure out what made the MLB popular when it was actually popular....specifically the late 1990s and the early 2000s. When people watched baseball what did they watch for? Players. They watched Derek "The Captain" Jeter and David "Big Papi" Ortiz in their prime. They were waiting on every pitch thrown to Mark Maguire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds who (steroids or no steroids) would bomb a ball at a ridiculous rate.The infamous Bronx Bombers and the Miracle BoSox. The pitching trio of Greg Maddox, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz. Even the stunners of Luis Gonzalez in Arizona and Dont...