Point of View / Bob Oates : The Sound-Bite Generation : Basketball’s Fast-Thinking Fans Favor Fastest Sport; Baseball Is as Good as Ever, but It Can’t Hold Audience

As baseball resumes this spring and as the basketball season begins to wind down, one thing is evident: On the popularity meter, these are sports heading in different directions.

Basketball is gaining. Baseball, the undisputed national pastime 30 or 40 years ago, has lost its grip on the country.

Nationwide polls, television ratings and other indicators make the critical points:

* Although pro football is America’s most popular spectator game, the public’s interest in basketball on all other fronts--college, prep and playground--is either comparable with football’s or ahead.

* Although attendance remains high for major league baseball--identifying the game’s loyal but aging fan base--support for baseball has been declining in the country at large.

* The college basketball championship game has moved ahead of the World Series to become the nation’s second-biggest annual sports attraction. In the most recent television ratings, the NCAA title game’s 22.2 was exceeded only by the Super Bowl’s 45.5.

Since 1980, the average annual World Series TV rating has tumbled 47% to last fall’s 17.3. By contrast, the NBA finals were up to a 17.9 average last spring, when college basketball’s Final Four matchups averaged 17.0.

It shouldn’t be supposed, though, that as a game, baseball has deteriorated.

This is still the same superb game it was in the years before television, before radio, before telephones.

What has changed is the America that created baseball more than a century ago.

Today, it is basketball that is in tune with the times.

*

This is an era of information overload, instant gratification and shortened attention spans. This, to use a TV phrase, is the sound-bite era.

And, contributing to the restive collective consciousness, basketball offers the quickness of movement and the repetitive, almost continuous, scoring that so strongly appeal to the sound-bite generation.

Baseball, once the obvious leader, is losing ground not because of its defects, real or imagined, but because 1990s Americans want something livelier, more modern, more pertinent.

And that’s basketball.

This is a country always in evolution, and its history, in large part, is a history of a quickening of pace.

In the slow, hard days before electric lights and indoor plumbing, the symbol of early America was the horse. Nothing moved faster than a horse could run.

The pace picked up with the coming of electric, steam and oil power to a more active generation, and the symbol of that somewhat hastier time was a baseball.

In those years, nothing moved faster than a ball could be hit with a bat, and baseball suitably became the national pastime. But that era, too, was doomed.

With fiber optics and computer science and dunked basketballs, the pace has quickened again, and the symbol of this new age is the sound bite.

Time appears to be instantaneous on living-color television. The evening news can acquaint the entire country with the latest war reports, or more often the latest scandals, in bites of eight or 10 seconds.

And in doing so, TV people have found that that’s all that Americans want to hear about anything, anyway, unless an ice skater has been assaulted.

As President Clinton recently said, “It’s hard to get more than one message a day across to the American people.”

If in such a country basketball is a better fit than baseball, the fit wasn’t planned, it simply happened, evolving out of the nature of basketball--which not too long ago was a slow-moving sport with final scores of 28-27 and 32-30.

It has become a 104-102 sport because, for one thing, most of the nation’s finest athletes are now in the NBA.

“I’d have gone for pro basketball if I were taller,” Kansas City Chief quarterback Joe Montana said, expressing a view often made by professionals in all sports. “Basketball was my favorite game in school.”

Many non-professionals, who play neighborhood and playground basketball all over America, agree with the pros.

“Basketball has such deep roots,” former coach Red Auerbach once said. “It’s a team game that two people can play. In fact, it’s a team game that one guy can play by himself.”

As a spectator sport, it also differs considerably from the others.

On a typical winter night, in an interval of three or four seconds, you can watch the athletic seven-footers of the NBA make--in one play--a sequence of six or seven seemingly impossible moves, followed by somebody’s sudden shot.

The shot drops in more often than not, starting a race to the other end of the court and, perhaps, a dunk, followed by another race and another basket and another race in a long, exciting melange of sound bites.

There are no home run trots, no balks, no huddles.

And it is the constant commotion that holds the attention of today’s shouting sports fans, who have to think fast to keep up with it all.

Their thoughts wandered last fall when a baseball player, Lenny Dykstra, in one of the big events of the sports year, took five consecutive pitches in a typically slow-moving playoff game--never moving his bat from his shoulder.

Most end-of-the-century Americans don’t have the time or patience to sit through the baseball playoffs. And so that night they missed one of the great athletic moments of our time.

*

The only thing that can speed up baseball is the 11 o’clock news. Between commercials, an entire World Series game can be staged in one sound bite without missing a significant pitch or base hit.

But that, of course, isn’t the game that baseball fans love.

Theirs, they insist, is a sport without flaws.

As aspiring baseball player Michael Jordan said last year when he was still playing basketball: “I don’t think baseball has done anything wrong. I think a new generation grew up with the NBA.”

Still very much in place are all the aspects of baseball that made it the national pastime early in the 1900s.

As presented on warm summer evenings--or even on cold nights in California--baseball is still a pastoral game of precision, pageantry and a pleasing simplicity that masks often picturesque complexity.

As a television program, though, it doesn’t adapt as well as basketball does or as football can with its avalanche of violent plays and instant replays.

So the best way to see a baseball game is to sit quietly in the stands, using binoculars now and then to focus on the batter, the pitcher, or the managers--who can always be outguessed--or on such details as the changing alignments of the defensive teams.

With almost every pitch, one or more infielders will shift left or right, move in or out, and one or more outfielders will move a step or two or more.

If the score is close, every pitch begins a new ballgame, and any pitch can be decisive.

What doesn’t happen can be as interesting as what does in baseball, which its fans call a game of expectations. And it all moves with such deliberate speed that every spectator has an opportunity to live in the minds of the principals--the players and their managers--and to think along with them pitch to pitch, out to out, inning to inning.

“For most clubs, the object is to get a runner to second base,” Oakland Athletic Manager Tony La Russa said.

Once he’s there, can the hitter get him home?

Can he do it if he falls behind, 0 and 2?

Can he do it if he works the count to 3 and 1?

It’s a team game, but it’s a team game only nominally. The essence of baseball is pitcher vs. hitter: the mind games of man vs. man.

No other sport except boxing is so conspicuously man to man.

*

Dykstra personified the timeless nature of the sport last October when a National League playoff game was poking along as usual. Tenth inning, score even, 3-3, series even, 2-2.

Coming to bat for the Philadelphia Phillies--slowly--Dykstra finally stepped in and took a strike.

Then he took a ball.

Then another ball.

Then he took Strike 2.

Then Ball 3.

Five pitches--and Dykstra’s bat was still on his shoulder.

Was anything happening?

Is there any drama when a good hitter simply stands there looking at the pitches?

It all depends.

It depends on whether the viewer realizes--or cares--that in that spot, Dykstra, a singles hitter normally, is working the count for his home run pitch--an inside fastball up in the strike zone.

“I think he would have fouled off three or four if he’d had to,” said Steve Moyer of Chicago’s Stats, Inc.

Instead, the sixth pitch was Dykstra’s. And since the home run he hit that time had been planned and deliberately executed, it could be recognized immediately for what it was--one of the most difficult feats in all of team sports.

It was also the turning point in a series that ended the season for the Atlanta Braves.

For those who had the time to wait for it, that was a moment.

*

Few things more clearly define the difference between baseball and basketball than what happens after the final play:

* When the game is over and the crowd leaves the arena, basketball fans find it hard to remember what went on, precisely. They know who won, but the rest is often a blur.

* By contrast, baseball fans, on their way home, or when they get there, can reconstruct the whole game in their minds.

A mental exercise of that sort is a distinct plus to baseball fans, as well as to football fans and golfers, who frequently replay their games too.

But it’s all irrelevant to basketball fans.

Their most recent game is a jot in history. Who wants to give it another thought? After the last dunk every night, basketball fans are instantly ready for another show.

The polls show that many baseball fans are over 50. Basketball fans tend to be much younger--and it could be that their world was shaped by, of all things, TV commercials.

The sound-bite era began, some believe, with television’s modern commercial messages, whose producers wished to cram a lot of information into a few seconds. Thus they started cutting quickly from this to that, and learned, in the process, that the optimum way to sell a complex message is with quick bites.

Among those viewing the earliest action commercials were the producers of TV news shows and movies, some of whom soon made movies that way, too, telling their simple stories with sequences of quick visual images.

And that’s what killed old movies: Not just the sex and violence and color, but also the modern pace.

Video games and MTV are likewise filled with rapidly changing images, and hence are more likely to appeal to younger sports crowds.

And, quite possibly, such activities have made basketball fans mentally more alert than the Americans of 50 years ago.

They simply think faster--or at least process visual information faster--than Grandpa used to.

It ought not to come as a surprise, in any event, that today’s sports fans, nourished on the action of the new commercials, new movies, new video games, MTV and the like, and hammered by the continuous sound bites of television’s news shows, should feel right at home at a basketball game.

And out of place in a ballpark.

The idea of settling down and getting more deeply involved in something that is just a game is foreign to the sound-bite generation.

But not to baseball fans, who, in a relaxed ballpark setting, still enjoy matching wits with a manager who can’t decide whether to change pitchers now or five minutes from now.

Clearly, the swiftness of the game makes basketball more congenial than baseball to the modern mind.

But it doesn’t make it better.

The rarest individual in the sports world today is the major leaguer who can get three hits in 10 at-bats. Who in the NBA can’t dunk a basketball?

How They Rate

Using television ratings from championship games as a barometer of fan interest, a look at television ratings at five-year intervals over the last 20 years. The four events listed are either series-deciding games--in the World Series and NBA finals--or the college basketball championship game and Super Bowl.

Event 1973 1978 1983 1988 1993 World Series 33.7 35.9 21.0 27.0 19.1 NCAA basketball 20.5 19.9 22.3 18.8 22.2 NBA finals 14.3 15.4 14.9 21.2 20.3 Super Bowl 41.6 47.1 46.4 43.5 45.5

Note: Series averages are a little lower each year for the World Series and NBA finals. Baseball’s 1983 number is abnormally low because it was a day game. Major league pragmatists concluded afterward that 21.0 is too high a price to pay for the afternoon starting times that satisfy purists and children. All World Series games are now played at night.