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Faceless of the Game: Where have all the MLB superstars gone?
America's 10 Favorite Athletes
Michael Jordan
LeBron James
Tom Brady
Stephen Curry
Peyton Manning
Lionel Messi
Aaron Rodgers
Cristiano Ronaldo
Muhammad Ali
Kobe Bryant
(poll was any FORMER OR CURRENT athlete)
Could any baseball player be LeBron?
We begin with a fact from the same polling data: Nearly one in four people who consider themselves "avid" NBA fans (23 percent) say LeBron James is their favorite player. That is how you define the face of your sport.
Now contrast that with baseball -- in which no one even remotely approaches the star power of a LeBron. There isn't a single player in the sport who ranks as the favorite of even 3 percent of all "avid" baseball fans. At the top of that list is the Cubs' Kris Bryant at 2.9 percent. For comparison, in the NFL, Brady checks in at 9.3 percent.
"That 2.9 percent for MLB is a mixed blessing," says Rich Luker, the founder of Luker on Trends. "It means the favorites are distributed more evenly across all teams compared to the NBA or NFL -- giving all teams a rooting interest. But no one athlete is big enough to draw national attention."
So what is it about baseball, or LeBron, or the NBA's star-making machinery, that produces that dramatic a disparity? Arn Tellem thinks he knows. For more than 30 years, he was a high-powered agent for players in both sports. But in 2015 he crossed over to the other side, to work for the Detroit Pistons as a vice chairman for Palace Sports & Entertainment.
"In basketball, compared to baseball, the best player usually wins the last game of the year," Tellem says. "If you look at the modern NBA, it was Magic [Johnson] and [Larry] Bird, leading into Isiah [Thomas] and Jordan ... and now Steph Curry, along with LeBron. And the best player usually wins the last game of the season, or is in the last game of the season. So the NBA playoffs and Finals are a tremendous showcase for the greatest players and the greatest athletes in this country."
There is no arguing with that, but this just in: The 2016 NBA Finals, featuring that LeBron and Steph Show, still got clobbered in the ratings by the World Series. As did Game 7 of those finals, by Game 7 of the World Series. So while LeBron might have six consecutive appearances in the Finals going for him, that's not all he has.
For more than three decades, dating to the arrival of Bird and Magic, the NBA has embraced star power as the secret sauce for How To Sell Your League. And baseball? Not so much.
America's 10 Favorite Athletes
Michael Jordan
LeBron James
Tom Brady
Stephen Curry
Peyton Manning
Lionel Messi
Aaron Rodgers
Cristiano Ronaldo
Muhammad Ali
Kobe Bryant
(poll was any FORMER OR CURRENT athlete)
Could any baseball player be LeBron?
We begin with a fact from the same polling data: Nearly one in four people who consider themselves "avid" NBA fans (23 percent) say LeBron James is their favorite player. That is how you define the face of your sport.
Now contrast that with baseball -- in which no one even remotely approaches the star power of a LeBron. There isn't a single player in the sport who ranks as the favorite of even 3 percent of all "avid" baseball fans. At the top of that list is the Cubs' Kris Bryant at 2.9 percent. For comparison, in the NFL, Brady checks in at 9.3 percent.
"That 2.9 percent for MLB is a mixed blessing," says Rich Luker, the founder of Luker on Trends. "It means the favorites are distributed more evenly across all teams compared to the NBA or NFL -- giving all teams a rooting interest. But no one athlete is big enough to draw national attention."
So what is it about baseball, or LeBron, or the NBA's star-making machinery, that produces that dramatic a disparity? Arn Tellem thinks he knows. For more than 30 years, he was a high-powered agent for players in both sports. But in 2015 he crossed over to the other side, to work for the Detroit Pistons as a vice chairman for Palace Sports & Entertainment.
"In basketball, compared to baseball, the best player usually wins the last game of the year," Tellem says. "If you look at the modern NBA, it was Magic [Johnson] and [Larry] Bird, leading into Isiah [Thomas] and Jordan ... and now Steph Curry, along with LeBron. And the best player usually wins the last game of the season, or is in the last game of the season. So the NBA playoffs and Finals are a tremendous showcase for the greatest players and the greatest athletes in this country."
There is no arguing with that, but this just in: The 2016 NBA Finals, featuring that LeBron and Steph Show, still got clobbered in the ratings by the World Series. As did Game 7 of those finals, by Game 7 of the World Series. So while LeBron might have six consecutive appearances in the Finals going for him, that's not all he has.
For more than three decades, dating to the arrival of Bird and Magic, the NBA has embraced star power as the secret sauce for How To Sell Your League. And baseball? Not so much.
