Just a week ago, the National League won its first Major League Baseball All-Star game since 1996.  But much like a tree falling in the forest without anyone around to hear, the contest didn’t make much of a sound.  The national television ratings were the lowest ever for the mid-Summer classic.

This is not a new concern.  It took a near economic depression to put a dent in attendance, but the All-Star game was broadcast on free TV.  Neither is it a new insight that the sport has a marketing problem.  The list of “how-come’s” has become nearly etched in stone, among them that there has been a drop in the number of African-American players, performance enhancing drug use has tainted results and reputation, the games are too long and there are too many of them broadcast.

What is less certain is the best list of “what to do’s.”  Those that exist fall short by ignoring two essential qualities of Major League Baseball.  First, it is a regional game.  And, second, connection requires continuity.

It was another special game — Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium — that made this point very well.  Writing in the New York Times, columnist William C. Rhoden cast his vote for the marketing power of continuity:

“Despite the team’s seeming narcissism, Major League Baseball could learn something from the annual showcase of Old-Timers’ Day.  The Yankees are the only team that annually holds one, but it is something that baseball should encourage every team to do periodically. Old-Timers’ Day is the celebration of continuity and reunion. Few teams have the Yankees’ history, but every team has former players”

It will be far harder to resuscitate the regional game.  Whether it was the Dodgers and Giants moving west, the advent of the airplane, the ubiquity of cable television, free agency or inter-league play, a set of events has conspired to erase the lines that used to separate the ivy walls of Wrigley, the wind of San Francisco and the bright lights of New York.

When each fan knows as much about the opposition as his or her own team, hope is replaced by calculation.  Rotisserie Baseball (forerunner of the Fantasy variety) is exhibit A. In the always-on, 24-hour-a-day, up-to-the-second, Internet-driven media world, the attractive power of mystery is eliminated.  It makes it hard to be a fan of a team in what use to be called the “second division” when you know just how hard it really will be to “get ‘em next year.”

But all hope is not yet lost with regard to creating and strengthening a fan’s commitment to the continuity of the game.  So rather than suggest games be set to a clock or a shorter season or longer play-offs, Major League Baseball could do some things that reinforce the continuity of the game.  From the time it is played by children to the time those kids as adults take their own families to the ballpark.

Here are three suggestions:

1.  Underwrite the use of wooden bats in college games

It is hard to reconcile the “ping” of a college game with the “crack” heard in major league stadia as being of the same game.  Questions of safety alone should prompt MLB to divert some of its resources to the cause.

2.  Play more during the day

The game is best viewed in day light.  For the last 20 years, only once did attendance at Cub’s games — played predominantly during the day — fall below the league average.  Television contracts and good ratings for compelling post-season games will make this a difficult task, but balanced against an eroding trend line of participation and interest ought to make it a no-brainer.

3.  Make the path to the major leagues more visible

For every Stephen Strausberg who goes from college to the major leagues in months, there are 50 Jesus Feliciano’s who spend years in the minor leagues.   MLB can make their path — whether from Rookie ball, A, Penn League or the Arizona Fall League — a point of pride and anticipation.

Whether every team ought to have an Old Timers’ Day is every team question.  But that, too, seems an easy answer.  Invest in continuity and reap commitment.

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Setting aside why the Star Spangled Banner is even played or sung before sporting events in the United States, who is responsible for it being done so badly so often?

At a Major League Baseball game again today, the scene recurred.  A perfectly presentable “recording artist” took the mic between the plate and the rubber to, it seems, get this party started.  Rather than perform a straight forward version of the anthem written in 1814, the singer took us all on a circuitous ride from dirge to trill.  And, sadly, not very well.

Who is responsible for making singers otherwise likely able to carry a pretty good tune, so often reach beyond their grasp?  If the National Anthem is a symbol of the nation’s values, then what does it say about us that such a casual approach is applauded?

The game changed in 1968 when Jose Feliciano sang the Anthem before Game 5 of the World Series between the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals.  Whether it really was the first personalized rendition of the Anthem or the first one televised or the first seen by the number of people who watched those games in those days, Feliciano created a stir.

The deal was closed a little over 22 years later when Whitney Houston sang her version of the Anthem at a time of war in January 1991 before Super Bowl XXV between the Buffalo Bills and the New York Giants.   Her version has raised millions for charity.

The fact is, though each of us may be terrific at something, we are not all similarly talented.  This is a good lesson and check on otherwise embarrassing behavior in most venues, but not so much in the sporting ones.  Listen no further than to Carl Lewis’ Anthem attempt at an NBA game in 1993 and you’ll appreciate the logic of playing to our diversity rather than our inner Jose or Whitney.

When Francis Scott Key saw the stars-and-stripes of the flag after a night’s bombardment during which he was unsure of the outcome, it brought him a wave of relief and us a National Anthem.  Today, too often, the wave of relief comes only when the last note fades.

It strikes me that, whatever else a singer is, a singer is a communicator.  They have a special vocabulary, sure, but still they are communicators.  The lesson to draw from those who do it well is to be grateful for their talent.  The rest of us need to remember that if the audience is put-off or distracted from the lyrics — the message — by the way they are delivered, the chance to be heard is lost.

That is too high a price to pay.

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At a recent set of focus groups –  you know where a small group of subjects is quizzed on a particular subject while being scrutinized through one-way glass by a smaller group of people hoping for insight that can be extrapolated across thousands — I heard confusion arise.  The facilitator said: “6 cents in every 100 dollars,” but it kept being played back as “6 percent in every 100 dollars.”

Big difference.  How come?  For nearly 60 years we have seen the meaning of numbers and percentages overtaken by the importance of the argument they are used to promote.  The focus group insight is: we are all guilty.  One reason may be how the apparent objectivity of numbers lends credibility to any argument no matter how contorted the equation that produced them.

Go back to 1954, when Darrell Huff and Irving Geis published “How to Lie with Statistics.” It kicked off a trend of adding math to marketing.

Here is how the book opened:

“‘There’s a mighty lot of crime around here,’ said my father-in law a little while after he moved from Iowa to California.  And so there was — in the newspaper he read.  It is one that overlooks no crime in its own area and has been known to give more attention to an Iowa murder than was given by the principal daily in the region in which it took place.

“My father-in-law’s conclusion was statistical in an informal way.  It was based on a sample, a remarkably biased one. Like many a more sophisticated statistic it was guilty of semiattachment: It assumed that newspaper space given to crime reporting is a measure of a crime rate.”

Guarding against the urge to confer credibility on every random column of numbers that “foot” — add up correctly — puts a burden of all of our five senses.  If extra sensory perception is the ability to see things without evidence or experience, it may take that sixth one to protect us from ourselves.

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Plug the word “context” into the Google News search box today and you’ll get 29,176 results.  This is a continuation of a downturn over the last couple of week.  The totals are driven by coverage of the national health care debate, the announced review of the CIA torture program and the uneasy future of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

There are even people calling for more context when there is little to be found.

What may be my favorite use of context this week may come from the Boston Globe.  It reviewed a new book dealing with the historical record of the Donner Party, which, on the way West 170 or so years ago, resorted to cannibalism in the face of deprivation.  The Globe gives the author, Daniel James Brown, credit for “…humanizing the people and putting their travails in historical context.”

Context has a way of letting us see what we don’t at first.

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