Tank McNamara by Bill Hinds for August 25, 2020

Yeah, that’s the reason no ones watching.

schadenfreude (noun)-pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune

Right, the crazy rules-changes baseball adopted have nothing to do with fans tuning out. If they had any brains, they would re-adopt all of the pre-DH rule book, and maybe just eliminate the “balk.”

Or maybe it has to do with all the politics that is now involved in the sport. I watched and followed sports as an escape. Athletes expressing there political opinion is their right. It is my right to cancel season tickets, turn off the TV and go fishing.

Besides, why attend a game when you can just watch it on the tube??

For me it’s the unknown aspect, such as not knowing if the season will actually have a successful conclusion. Also, I’ve watched quite a few of the MLB games and it’s hard to get into them when there isn’t a live crowd there (cardboard cutouts and piped-in noise only goes so far). Plus, it doesn’t help that my team (The Texas Rangers) has been wildly inconsistent.

All the SJW pandering doesn’t help. Who wants to watch a bunch of grown men getting paid millions of dollars to play kids games gripe about how awful the country is?

The real test for sports fans in the U.S. will come when the NFL season begins (or doesn’t).

The lack of fans in the stands doesn’t particularly bother me with baseball, since I often play music and watch the games with the sound off, anyway. Watching golf also doesn’t require noisy crowds to make it enjoyable. Viewing soccer sans fanatics is a bit weird, as I suspect NFL football will be.

The once bitten twice shy theory. The Doc may be on to something there.

Half the fun of watching a game on the tube is the crowd reactions, helping you fantasize that you’re there.

I’ll admit I just havn’t been able to get enthusiastic about this years MLB season. However, being a Mets fan might contribute to it.

Sort of like watching talking head pundits on TV.

Maybe too many political messages are turning off fans?

Baseball has been a disaster with their decision to not have a bubble. As for the NBA, a lot of their fans are facing evictions so likely cut everything but internet long ago which the utterly useless Nielsen Ratings don’t measure. And if you are so utterly offended by the protests, here’s a wonderful idea: WORK TO FIX THE GD PROBLEM! You’d think if anything, I mean anything, would have gotten cops to stop murdering black people it would have been all the attention being focused on their continual murder of black people. Clearly, they don’t care, and sadly, neither do a lot of you. The protests are going to keep going until the problem is solved, and you whining like little babies that it’s messing up your sports shows you haven’t grown up at all.

Isn’t watching sports, in some and perhaps a large way, an escape from reality? We watch athletes and dream ‘I can do/did that one day’. Now empty stands/fake crowd noise reminds us of covid reality, and names on the back of jerseys reminds of us social unrest. Ratings are so poor because we can’t get a break from reality. This is why ratings are so poor. Am I right or off track?

I don’t watch any sports that denigrate the symbols of our country!

The anti-USA stance and promotion of racism had nothing to do with it, I suppose?