One of my favorite sportswriters, Glenn Dickey, has an interesting take on the respective brand promises of Major League Baseball and the National Football League (italics are mine). This is relevant in the era of steroids and instructive in thinking about the way people experience brands. Indeed, most football fans hear about a player getting busted and it’s almost a non-event. When it happens to baseball stars, it’s literally a federal case. To Dickey, it has to do with the experience that fans of each sport expect. Records are simply more important to baseball fans. To most football fans, even die-hards, records are nice, but nowhere close to being an obsession. They’re just not a big part of how the fan experiences the game.
“Football fans just enjoy the games, which I think is a much more sensible approach. If they think about it, they realize that rules changes to open up the game have meant much gaudier passing statistics, so it’s impossible to compare current quarterbacks and receivers with those who played in the ‘60s, or even earlier. And, who cares?
“The baseball records that fans prize are essentially meaningless, not just (or even primarily) because of steroids but because of smaller parks and a livelier baseball.
“Baseball writers complicate this by wondering aloud how to evaluate the performances in the socalled Steroid Era in voting for the Hall of Fame. It’s simple: Just do what you should always have done: Evaluate players within their eras. All this talk about Jim Rice and Andre Dawson looking better because they apparently were not on steroids is ridiculous. Rice and Dawson should have been voted in years ago (I’ve always voted for them) because they were dominant players in their era. Mark McGwire doesn’t belong because, though he had two mammoth home run years in the ‘90s, he was very inconsistent throughout his career.
“The irony of all this is that football players are much more likely to benefit from steroids because, for most players, strength is the primary consideration.”
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