Is the NBA About to Overtake MLB as America's #2 Sport?

I want to start off this post with a comparison of two recent championship series.  Let's compare the 2009 World Series, in which the Yankees beat the Phillies in 6 games, with the 2010 NBA Finals, in which the Lakers beat the Celtics in 7 games.  Specifically, I want to take a look at the average number of viewers for each series as an indicator of the popularity of each sport.

2009 World Series
6 Games
Avg. viewers: 19.3 million
[source Wikipedia]

2010 NBA Finals
7 Games
Avg. viewers: 18.1 million
[source Wikipedia]

The World Series ratings are higher than the NBA Finals and that is a pretty good indicator that baseball is the more popular sport.  No argument here.  Baseball's audience may be older than the hoops demo, but it is also much larger.  What I want to argue about is not what are the facts on the ground, but what can we predict for the future.  And even more so, I want to stake a claim: the day of the NBA surpassing MLB as the second most popular American sport is sooner than you think.
I want to share with you a few more figures.  Now look at the Nielsen ratings (more easily obtained than the viewers totals, but otherwise comparable) for the last five championships in both sports:

MLB World Series Avg. Nielsen Ratings:
2006 - 10.1
2007 - 10.7
2008 - 8.5
2009 - 17.2
2010 - 8.25

NBA Finals Avg. Nielsen Ratings:
2007 - 6.2
2008 - 9.3
2009 - 8.4
2010 - 10.6
2011 - 10.2


What first strikes me about the graph above is how close the ratings are for these two sports.  Both appear to have ratings consistenty around 10, with one outlier apiece.  Now take out that outlier of a World Series in 2009 (defending champion Phillies + 10-year World Series Title drought Yankees + 2 of the top 5 US Metro Areas = millions more viewers than the average WS telecast), and there are two very apparent trends here.  The MLB is pointed down and the NBA is on the rise.  The 2010 NBA Finals rematching the Celtics and Lakers outrated the 2010 World Series between the Rangers and Giants (sadly both the second most popular teams by those names).  But don't jump to blame the TV markets because the 2011 NBA Finals was more highly rated too and took place in the #4 Dallas-Fort Worth and in #11 San Francisco, which has a population only about one million less than #8 Miami from the NBA Finals [Source: Wikipedia].  I am also willing to bet that without the Yankee juggernaut to boost rating, the World Series will have lower ratings again this year.  So this is where we stand today: baseball is losing ground, and basketball is gaining it.

My own interest in baseball has basically followed the career arc of the great Pedro Martinez.  When Pedro was throwing near no-hitters night after night and K-ing guys out left and right, baseball was in a Golden (Sterioids) Era.  Pedro may not have been MLB's signature guy, but he was characteristic of the charismatic, record-setting, once-in-a-lifetime performers in baseball.  Bonds, Jeter, A-Rod, Manny, Ichiro, Sosa, McGwire, Clemens, Maddux, Rivera.  All those famous one-name players, and yet how many of them did you just wince at reading?  We didn't like that players used steroids, but there was a time when we liked watching all of them.  We even liked watching less charismatic guys who were still great players: Nomar, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado (I did it just for you, Phil), Gary Sheffield and Tom Glavine.  They all had something of Pedro's charisma, superhuman talent, sense-of-the-moment and maybe even some huge career milestones or an amazing postseason performance.  The list of talented players was long and strong.  Today baseball is about defense and pitching, with way more no-hitters to see, but do we pay any more attention?  Can we name 5 guys who are playing today who could comfortably fit on either of the prior lists?

But now in the NBA there is some hope.  The NBA Wikipedia link above has this section and quote:

Post-Jordan decline
The retirement of Michael Jordan set in motion the decline in NBA ratings which continues today.

Here I want to correct Wikipedia, or at least get it informed and up-to-date.  Ratings are trending up and the league is chock full of talent.  We expected Kobe and the Lakers to steal their way to another three-peat, but the competition for Best Regular Season Team at various points looked like it could belong to the Mavericks, Celtics and Heat before going to the Bulls.  Derek Rose won the MVP, but strong cases were made by others especially Dirk and Dwight Howard, but not including the consensus most talented player in the game.  The NBA playoffs this year featured the return of the Knicks as a competitor, a welcome change which was led by Melo and Amare.  There were also the great upsets against former champs in the Spurs and Lakers, an arrival to the conversation for Zach Randolph and his young Grizzlies team, a disappointment of sorts for the promise showed by Kevin Durant and the Thunder, and perhaps a last stand from the Celtics.  Then there was the Finals, which featured a rematch of two great teams and a budding rivalry between them, the opportunity for redemption for Dirk Nowitzki, the last real hope for Jason Kidd, victory for both legendary never-won-it guys, and the frustration of the most talented Big Three in the game who now rival the Yankees for the biggest villains in sports. 

The end of this season left me wishing that the NBA season and playoffs would keep running all through the summer, first because I was so entertained and intrigued by this season and second because with the end of the NBA and an NFL/NBA lockout looming, it looked like all that was left was basebell.  Baseball, once something that I used to link fondly with thoughts of summer, beer from the bottle, and fresh cut grass, has recently felt more like a chore.  In an era of too-many-distractions from message threads on Facebook with college buddies to endless amounts of instant streaming video on Netflix, an NBA game can hold my attention for the whole three-plus hours, but I can barely train myself to sit and watch a half inning of baseball without wanting to reach for my phone or computer to Google something more interesting while I wait for the next pitch.

If I had to buy stock in either MLB or the NBA, based solely on their popularity not than finances sinces the NBA is a total mystery there, I would go for the NBA every time.  MLB is not going to get much more popular internationally, but kids all over Asia, Europe, Latin America and even Africa know who the NBA's stars are.  We care about sports somewhat because we played on teams when we were younger, in part because we admire the feats of skills and strategy, and in part because we don't have anything better to do sometimes.  But mainly what keeps us tuning back in is the characters, teams, and stories that we start to care about.  Right now, with basketball I am locked in.  I care.  But Michael and I recently talked about how we would each like to follow the Mets to make the summer more interesting and we both felt it was hard just to care enough.  There just isn't a person, team or story in baseball to really make me care the way that Pedro could.  So rest in retirement, Pedro.  And rest in peace, baseball.

What Did College Do For Me?

I decided to come to BU in the fifth grade when I took a trip to Boston and fell in love with the city.  I don't even think Google was around back then, but I know when I got home from that trip I did an AOL search or whatever I used at the time and looked at the BU website.  It was pretty much in my head from that point that BU was going to be where I went to college.  By the time I finished high school I was conscious of the advice of counselors and others and considered a bunch of schools.  Ultimately, I only applied to BU and the University of Rochester (which I can't even imagine having gone to).  I wanted to come to Boston because I loved the city, I was following the Red Sox religiously, and I was excited about taking courses in the Core Curriculum, since I thought it might give me the kind of education that  I felt I was missing in my high school.

When I came for Orientation, I remember one of the deans giving us a short pep talk in which he said we had come there to build the minds that we would live in for the rest of our lives.  My memory often fails me, particularly with quotes, but that one stands out brilliantly clearly in my mind. Studying in the Core Curriculum for two years felt like a continuation of that project that the dean charged us with.  My first humanities professor was a friendly yet wacky man and I learned some interesting things in his class, particularly about religion.  But in my sophomore year, I took an honors class with a professor who really inspired me and the experience was amazing since it was an opportunity to learn from and interact with a truly brilliant person.  Much of what I learned in that class really did change my brain and my mind forever.

But that only accounts for four classes that I took out of 32 or so.  Four of those classes without a doubt helped build the mind that I wanted to live in for the rest of my life.  Plus the four or so classes I took during the study abroad time in Padova.  That experience more than anything was the most intensive learning experience of my life: meeting new people, learning a language and culture, traveling, taking classes in subjects like film and writing that I would not have tried at BU.  That also helped build the mind I wanted to have.

The rest of my education doesn't feel like it was part of that same project but rather a different parallel goal.  I studied econ. and each class felt like it was just rehashing the same examples and providing a little color and detail to the picture I got from Intro level classes.  In fact, I believe that I've learned less about economics from BU courses than from following Marginal Revolution and other econ blogs, which I still check daily.  Ironically, I first learned about the blog from a professor that I had taken a class with.  While that deserves recognition, I think the credit is due more to the relative strangers writing their blogs than it does to the teacher with whom I took two classes.

Today, I'm working as a teacher and this question of how valuable college was in building the mind that I want to live in comes up for me because a) I have an effect on my own students and 2) I have to make a decision on whether to pursue a Master's degree, even when the Master's program that I started through TFA was a strong reminder of how so many classes at BU failed to really inspire me or leave me with some knowledge that I really valued.  In the end, I think I'll do the Master's program but more because it is an important step in a professional career, not because I don't think I could learn this information elsewhere.  I'm sure there are blogs, sites and books that could teach me how to be better at my work.  In fact, I read many of them already.  So the question now is what to do: just do a degree because it will help me get ahead or try to carry on the project that the dean charged me with at freshman orientation and keep building the mind that I want to live in.  The one thing I do know about my time at BU, is that it gave me the ability to learn and think for myself.