Sports Audiences and Fandom

Sports Audience has always been the key factor in any given sports success. Obviously certain sports would not survive if people didn't pay for tickets to go see them or watch them on TV. Wenner has described a cultural development of watching our favorite teams play and especially attending live games. Going to an MLB game in the summer is a traditional memory of my childhood. So many cultural norms have come from professional sports. The Super Bowl is probably the best example of a day that almost everyone in America knows of and celebrates and in reality it's all surrounding one game. Although it's just one game that may not directly effect any of our lives, sporting events have always been a great way that people relieve stress and have a relaxing afternoon at a game.
Another good example is baseball after the 9/11 attacks. Baseball became a very meaningful way for thousands  of strangers to come together and try and get away from it all. A certain level of bonding together was felt in all Americans after 9/11, and baseball was a positive influence on that as a whole. Through the past decade of an economy in shambles, the sporting industry has been one of the few things that have thrived. The combination of social networking and advanced ways to get your sports have only helped this gigantic industry. Wenner's book has linked different generations with different social role models in the sports world.
Every generation has had players that young people look up to, but now social media has made it so fans get closer than ever before to their favorite players. Twitter has blown up so quickly and so many prominent athletes use it to the point where it has already started becoming a social norm to use it. Sports audiences have been able to be bigger than ever for any game. Now anyone can view live games on a computer, ipad or smartphone, as well as the watching a game in person or on TV. The sporting industry has also made huge profits through the use of live games on a phone. I read a sportsbusinessdaily.com article about the success of MLBTV and MLBAM. According to the article, in 2010 an app called MLB At-Bat was the highest grossing iphone app.
It's also become extremely easy to get tickets to games almost instantly. The article stated that over 34 million MLB tickets were sold in the 10' season, which was roughly half the attendance for the entire season. The technological advancements of the past five years have developed a new way we watch and therefore developing a new audiences. Wenner said that our cultural values are being expressed through sports media in terms of how close they are followed by the media. Watching a game on some sort of electronic device has just seemed to become the primary way people view games. Fans still attend games, but the audience has become much larger than whoever is watching it in the stadium. Before all the technological advances of our time, it used to be the people at the game were the only ones that saw it. In this generation a sports audience could expand 50 times the amount of people in the seats.

Sources:  http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2011/03/21/Media/MLBAM.aspx?hl=Sports%20Audiences%20and%20fandom%20&sc=0
Wenner, Lawrence, ed. Mediasport. New York: Routledge, 1998

The NHL All-Star Weekend Takes the Cake

The NHL all-star weekend has managed to develop into the best event of all when it comes to letting the stars shine bright. The combination of the skills competition and the exciting draft process which makes for completely different teams each year has propelled the sports all-star festivities above all else.

Oh yea and there's a third reason-The players actually play the game! The NHL all-star game is always coupled with the NFL's Pro Bowl and i'm not sure anyone can even consider that a game. The Pro Bowl is a friendly game of touch at best. Now of course there's a certain intensity and physicality that comes with playing in the NHL, but the players have a way better balance between not hitting a guy too hard but also not giving away goals and letting the other team score.
Also, i think we as fans get more entertainment out of a high scoring hockey game, because let's face it, many more goals get scored in an ASG then in any other hockey game. A soft game of football that usually turns into a shootout could be exciting to some, but that's more apt to happen in a real NFL game. The scores that get scored in the NHL game are a little something out of the ordinary. We aren't used to seeing hockey games that finish 11 to 9 or something like that.

Next-The skills competition and the fantasy all-star draft. The idea to have two captains draft an entire team of the games best and have them be all mixed up between conferences has been great. It's been a few years since they stopped doing east vs. west and they also had the World vs. North America, those were both cool and everything. But the idea of having different teams every year has the potential to be amazing. We saw that in this years game with things like Marion Gaborik scoring two first-period goals on his own teammate Henrik Lundqvist. It shows something that this game has that the other sports lack, competition. As teammates the two were competing fiercely to best the other. When Gaborik scored his first goal Henrik dropped down on the ice for a second as if to say "I can't believe i didn't stop him."

And with the implementation of the draft, the skills competition gets very interesting. The thing i love about the skills part of it, is that everyone participates. There are so many cool events, some individual and some team oriented, but the players are into it and the stuff they can do on the ice is amazing. If any league needs to think about changing their All-Star process, it should be the NBA and NFL. At least now in baseball the winner of the mid-summer classic gets home field advantage in the World Series,but NBA and NFL are just brutal. I would love to be able to get excited for the NBA ASG, because all of the best basketball players on one floor does seem potentially awesome, but again, nobody plays for real. At least defense, that's for sure. Nobody plays d.  I guess it's nothing to get to hung up on, for the most part they mean nothing except for in the MLB. It's just is nice to know that one league has an at least tolerable game with competition to watch. As far as NBA goes, i'll be ready for the all-star squad in the Olympics and love every minute of watching our country dominate the world, but they can hold on to their all-star game-I'm good.