Re: Can team USA lose this gold in basketball?
Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 8:48 pm
Fun fact: USA and Serbia are only countries that are finalists in 3 team sports.
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p0peye wrote:Fun fact: USA and Serbia are only countries that are finalists in 3 team sports.
Pitimiquel wrote:p0peye wrote:Fun fact: USA and Serbia are only countries that are finalists in 3 team sports.
Which sports?
Mr. E wrote:Lexluthor wrote:Tv ratings there's your proof . And Basketball has more Mark famous stars.
You have to be careful just going by certain TV ratings. That kind of data is easy to manipulate to tell the narrative one would want.
I am a baseball fan - love the game; but to me basketball is religion. I'm a Texan who will change the channel from a football game in order to watch pre-season basketball. As much as I'd love basketball to be the #2 sport in the USA right now, I just don't see that you can make the realistic case. Yes, you are right that there are more marketable stars in the NBA, but that isn't a great measure for overall popularity. Casual fans still tend to glom towards baseball, especially when factoring in them playing twice the games as an NBA team.
Basketball's crowning achievement over baseball in the United States actually has nothing to do with the NBA. It is all about the NCAA tournament. The NCAA tournament is easily the biggest event in USA sports after the Super Bowl. But so much of that translates as team loyalty and results and not so much the actual game played.
Globally, Basketball is leaps & bounds ahead of Baseball, so there is that. I just think that it is far too institutionalized in American society to be overcome by some TV ratings or James Harden Taco Bell commercials.
I do love the discussion about the two sports, though.
Chicago76 wrote:
Another issue to consider is how this popularity translates to player pools. NBA talent pools skew extremely tall. There is almost zero competition from other major sports for a 6-6 kid. Some in pitching from baseball, but the height range of baseball players is 5-9 to 6-6. That popularity competition between NFL, NBA, and MLB most directly hits MLB. NBA avoids most of it by skewing so tall. MLB suffers the most by being less popular than NFL, which requires huge rosters that are filled by guys of similar stature as MLBers...until their bodies change through all that training.
When you look at roster composition, the popularity and physical requirements explain the racial/international compositions of MLB. Hardly any African Americans. Tons of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in particular. I get that baseball is life in those places, but for a country the soze of the U.S. with the history in baseball the U.S. has, this is massive over representation--the level of which can only occur because baseball isn't popular enough among normal sized human Americans to produce the players needed to reduce that representation.
LookToShoot wrote:Chicago76 wrote:
Another issue to consider is how this popularity translates to player pools. NBA talent pools skew extremely tall. There is almost zero competition from other major sports for a 6-6 kid. Some in pitching from baseball, but the height range of baseball players is 5-9 to 6-6. That popularity competition between NFL, NBA, and MLB most directly hits MLB. NBA avoids most of it by skewing so tall. MLB suffers the most by being less popular than NFL, which requires huge rosters that are filled by guys of similar stature as MLBers...until their bodies change through all that training.
When you look at roster composition, the popularity and physical requirements explain the racial/international compositions of MLB. Hardly any African Americans. Tons of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in particular. I get that baseball is life in those places, but for a country the soze of the U.S. with the history in baseball the U.S. has, this is massive over representation--the level of which can only occur because baseball isn't popular enough among normal sized human Americans to produce the players needed to reduce that representation.
Your logic doesn't make sense. The average white or African American is not walking around 6'6+ in the first place. Puerto Rico and DR (which are nationalities by the way, not races) have a population is a majority of African descent, so I'm not sure why you would think a racial component would matter here.
This is baseball you're talking about. You don't have to be super athletic and quick. Most baseball players are overweight. It comes to down to culture, and baseball is a dying sport in America.