Thanks to Guy for his latest thoughts. And Guy, I do appreciate your scheduling notes on my second favorite sport.
I do plenty of posts on sportsball-is-a-business and on obscure sports. I find that both of those subjects present an opportunity to answer a reader’s question, “Make me care about something that wouldn’t ordinarily occur to me, or at any rate have some clever insight that may transcend sports.”
I will shamelessly play up to our Hammer and bring up the subject of cricket. I actually did know about the sport long before this site existed. I don’t follow it in the sense of checking ESPN cricinfo all the time, but I do follow it in the broad sense of The Ashes and the World Cup qualification journey of the US team. And that’s what I’m going to get into– can you be a “casual fan” of cricket, or for that matter, ANY sport? The sportsball business people, especially in the context of sports not in the Big Four Plus Two (NFL. MLB, NBA, NHL, plus MLS and NASCAR), always think in terms of, “How do we get someone who just wants to watch a ballgame/other kind of competition to tune in and check us out and maybe, if not become an avid fan, att least someone who will nOT simply switch channels in future when they see our sport on the tube?”
Part of the strategy appears to be either to scale down the game so that a viewer needn’t make a time investment beyond the hour or two to kill, or, to scale down the season itself so that the viewer who actually did like the sample they saw wouldn’t feel like they were being dragged into a several-months-long slog waiting for the final outcome of the competition.
The result is that cricket will have a “festival”-type T20 season of a new league in the US this summer– T20 is a shortened version of the game that usually takes no longer than a baseball game (and in any event no longer than a No Fun League game) to be completed. The games will be played in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex over a three-week period in July. The US will also host some T20 World Cup games there next year, and the powers that be in cricket would like to create a rivalry between the US and West Indies as an ongoing sort of “occasion” that the (*ahem*) occasional US viewer will watch. While there is an avid fan base among the South Asian and other Commonwealth expat communities, the for-shits-‘n’-giggles why-the-hell-not viewer is the one they hope will create the numbers for advertisers to take the telecasts seriously going forward, especially after the 2024 T20 World Cup
Another sport that is looking to do something similar is rugby union. which will have a ‘sevens” competition strictly in the US aside for the world tour they already do– “sevens’ is seven players playing games of seven-minute halves, i.e., a well-shortened scaled-down version that allows for numerous games between many teams to be played all on the same day in the same ballpark. There will be five weekends in five US cities from mid-June to early August, the games to be carried on CBS Sports and FS1. So, if one game is a stinker, just wait a few minutes, there’ll be another.
Would you want to watch a game you were not familiar with, if it required you to really get into it? Maybe not. But if it’s fed to you in small bites, to where “y’know, maybe I’ll watch this next time it’s on” is the reaction the game gets, that’s what the promoters are looking for.
But this is a part of life that is joked about as being the “toy store.” Feeding people digestible bites of other serious sorts of things, whether cultural or even political, should also be possible as well, to gain making them less unfamiliar and thus not as “scary”– the trouble is that nowadays, you’re liable to be fed a whole lot of spinach, and in the same way geese are fattened up to make foie gras. Sportsball people KNOW you don’t HAVE to like their sport for you to live a perfectly good productive life, and that they don’t have a God-given right to your bucks. The Left’s culture warriors lack such knowledge.
