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Are the new rules changes in Major League Baseball designed to speed up the pace of play actually keeping people from changing the channel when games are on? Is time finally catching up with the once indestructible golf legend Tiger Woods? USA Today Sports columnist Christine Brennan joined 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to offer her take on these water-cooler debate topics.
The problem facing baseball, Brennan told Berman and Riedel, is one that all sports are facing: staying relevant in a faster-paced world. “I think a lot of sports are looking at their demographics, and they don’t want to become horse racing, and they don’t want to become boxing, and they don’t want to become track and field, i.e., they don’t want to fall off a cliff. Now, I like those sports, some more than others, but the fact is, ebb and flow of interests in sports, and the demographics for baseball. Where are the kids?” Brennan then expanded on that hypothesis. “They’re trying to get to the attention span and adapt to the lack of an attention span of so many of us, and kids who want to move on to other things and video games, and they’re just trying desperately to see if they can attract younger people.”
Brennan believes Tiger’s recent surgeries and struggles at The Masters last week simply reinforce the adage about Father Time being unbeaten. “He’s 47, but his body, you know, he’s got the body of an 80-year-old. That was before he crashed his car in California little more than two years ago… That right leg is rebuilt, and it has pin and rods and needles in there… But if that’s the lasting image, the last visual of him… it would be a very sad statement if that’s the last we see of him.”
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