How do you make a deeply complicated game – with quirky rules and idiosyncratic vocabulary, derided as boring – palatable to a new audience, at a time of increasing competition from esports and video games such as the Fortnite juggernaut? (via Chicago Tribune)
Welcome to another edition of The Commish, a series of posts in which I try to save baseball. A while back I wrote about Super Mega Baseball and how I thought MLB could learn a lot from that game. Last night, I plopped on the couch and watched a Netflix documentary about cricket and was blown away that….wow…maybe I actually am right!
In 2002, “Cricketing authorities were looking to boost the game’s popularity with the younger generation in response to dwindling crowds and reduced sponsorship. It was intended to deliver fast-paced, exciting cricket accessible to thousands of fans who were put off by the longer versions of the game.” (via Wikipedia)
2002. Not all that long ago
I’m no cricket expert but what I learned was that cricket was old, slow and boring – so some guys came up with T20 Cricket – you’d have to study the rules of cricket for that to make sense – the short version is they limited the number of at bats – but the end result was it got the game to be under three hours.
If you watch the doc you’ll see they also made it faster paced and brought in high production entertainment packages around the game.
One of the cool thinks that perked my interested was THE PLAYER AUCTION! Imagine seeing the Wilpons and the other owners sitting around a table bidding on FAs? YOU WOULD WATCH THE HELL OUT OF THIS!!!
Watch 5 seconds of this video and tell me you wouldn’t stare at this…
The two-day mega VIVO IPL 2018 Player Auction concluded in Bengaluru with 169 players filling up the 182 available slots. Right from its inception, the league has been a destination where talent meets opportunity and it was once again evident as out of 113 Indian cricketers that were bought, 71 are uncapped, and will get a chance to unleash their potential in the upcoming edition. (via IPLT20.com)
I highly encourage you to watch the Netflix Cricket Doc. It’s like 18 minutes long. Watch it and you will see that there is a road to fixing baseball, if we are willing to take it – and it starts with making the game shorter.
