Our Second Job

Sometimes, if feels like watching baseball has become The Common Man’s second job, rather than his favorite hobby. Certainly, The Uncommon Wife feels that way. After all, the playoffs have been going on for almost three weeks now, and there are still at least four games left (but hopefully more). And TCM has caught most of these contests in full or at least in part, particularly when he’s been participating in ESPN’s Baseball Tonight Live chats.

So how much baseball have you been watching these last few weeks? If you’re like TCM, the answer is a lot. If you watched every minute of the division series matchups, you would have watched almost two full days of baseball (47 hours, 53 minutes). If you managed to limit yourself to just the primetime matchups, you’d have watched 21 hours and 27 minutes of action.

And while the number of teams and games were reduced in the Championship Series, that didn’t make as big a difference in the overall game time as you would expect. You still would have spent an entire standard work week watching baseball (41 hours, 5 minutes). And if you had limited yourself to just the featured game each day, you would have actually watched more baseball than in the division series, as the D.S.es took seven days, while the Championship Series was spread out over nine. Those nine games totaled 30 hours and 46 minutes.

And the games have gotten longer as we’ve gotten deeper into the postseason. Division Series games were, on average, 14 minutes shorter than Championship Series games, fueled mostly by four games in the Rangers-Yankees series that lasted more than 3:45. There was just a single game in the postseason longer than 3:45 that the Yankees were not involved in (out of six).

So when you hear pundits and main stream media types decry relatively low ratings for ball games (especially compared to football ratings) and use them to suggest that people don’t love the game anymore, remind yourself that even the best of us need a day off from work every now and again.

Watching You Watching

The Nielsen ratings are in on the Democratic National Convention, and the news is good for CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC. According to TVbytheNumbers, "the ratings for the first night of the 2008 Democratic Convention were substantially higher than the first night in 2004, with prime-time viewership up as much as 88% and adults 25-54 viewership up as much as 127%." The increase in viewership carried over into the second, third, and fourth nights as well. It's an impressive testament to the drawing power of the 2008 election, and how excited Americans, particularly younger Americans, seem at the prospect of an Obama presidency. Or at least how excited Obama supporters are.

The Common Man suspects that next week's Republican National Convention in St. Paul will see a significant drop in ratings, as the star power associated with John McCain simply cannot compare to Barak Obama and the Clintons. And that's a shame. Frankly, The Common Man is bothered that, at the most, just 27.7 million Americans tuned in to the convention last night, especially when 40 million tuned in to watch Michael Phelps. And is disappointed that fewer still will see McCain's closing speech next Thursday. Even this sudden spike in interest only underlines the American public's commitment to style over substance, to the ten-second soundbite and 30-second analysis to actually listening to the candidates. This has become the very essence of the American Dewmocracy. That Americans don't have the attention span to commit to hearing the whole, they want someone to tell them what is important so they can go back to snowboarding or skateboarding or wakeboarding or whatever kind of boarding is extreme this week, instead of being forced to parse through and process a candidate's message for themselves.

Look, The Common Man knows that no one likes to be scolded or told what they should do. He hates it himself. But if you can't be bothered to at least take an hour this week and next to listen to both Obama and McCain's speech and decide for yourself who you trust and who will serve America's interests best, then you don't deserve to call yourself a man. If you are going to allow Alan Colmes, or Sean Hannity, or Chris Matthews to filter information for you, so that you are being told what to think, rather than taking control of your own opinions and your own vote, and making up your own damn mind, you may as well just give your vote back.

Not everyone cares about politics, and that's fine. But you don't have to check out Fivethirtyeight.com twice a day, and read the Drudge Report, and skim Daily Kos every day to to understand that this election will probably have real consequences in how you get to live your life for the next four (and maybe eight) years. If you can't be bothered to care a little about that, then how is it possible that you care enough to get up each morning? If you have no interest in influencing the world around you, what's the point of doing anything? If you can't tell that deciding who to vote for will be more important to you than watching a man, half-way around the world, swim of all things, what does that say about your priorities?

So The Common Man encourages all of you, even those (like himself) who are inclined to support Barak Obama, to watch the Republican National Convention next week, or at least John McCain's acceptance speech on Thursday night. And if you missed Obama's speech last night, you can find it on his website and watch it at your convenience. Take some ownership over your decision-making, step up, and be a man.