Big business game rules1/12/2024 The release last week of his controversial housing policy – which will strip powers from local councils and hand them to the state government – apparently brought on a moment of reflection. On Tuesday, Andrews said he’d simply changed his mind about staying on. While the outgoing premier promised before last year’s election that he would see out his full term, the expectation has long been that he would orchestrate a transfer of power, most likely to deputy premier Jacinta Allan. David RoweĪndrews’ departure is a surprise, but no shock. Outgoing Victorian Premier Dan Andrews: There’s no doubt the pandemic changed the relationship between the Andrews government and the business community. The league hopes those kids will get hooked, Mills said, and eventually grow into adult fans who - like me - are willing to spend way too much of their time and money on baseball.The corporate sector will hope that the resignation of longstanding Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews might spark a reset in the antagonistic relationship that has developed with the Victorian government since the arrival of the pandemic.īut a climate of rising pressures on household budgets, stretched state government finances, sticky inflation and high interest rates means the “us against them” strategy that Andrews deployed to great effect is unlikely to disappear. every single night, they may be more likely to bring their, you know, 5-, 6-, 7-year-old kid to the stadium downtown,” he said. “I think as folks realize that games aren’t going till 1 a.m. “I think the bigger question will be, what happens to attendance next year, right?” he said.īut the effort to shorten games is aimed at sustaining the sport well beyond next year, said Mills of UT Austin, by making going to the ballpark more kid-friendly. That once-every-four-years tournament typically boosts interest in the sport for a few months, said Khalid Ballouli, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina. There was also the World Baseball Classic right before the MLB season started. “So there’s more reason to go to those games, because they may impact whether or not your team makes the playoffs,” he said. “We saw vacation travel go way up, we saw good attendances at things like music concerts, obviously, things like Taylor Swift, setting all sorts of records,” Matheson said.Īnother recent change that may have boosted attendance? More teams make the playoffs, said Brian Mills, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. A big part of the jump in attendance may be that post-pandemic revenge spending we’ve been reporting on. “In a world where your time is valuable, people like the idea of getting an entire baseball game in at about 30 minutes less than it was the year or two before,” said Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross.īut shorter games don’t tell the whole story, he said. We drank beer, ate hot dogs, saw some home runs, did the wave, and the game only lasted two hours and twenty minutes. Thirty thousand other fans and I packed into Minneapolis’ Target Field in late July to watch the Minnesota Twins beat the Chicago White Sox. Those are positive signs for a league looking to build a new generation of fans.įull disclosure, I was one of the more than 70 million people who paid to see a MLB game this summer. Those were gambles for a sport that prides itself on tradition, but the changes seem to have worked: MLB saw its highest attendance since 2017 this year, and on average, games were 24 minutes shorter than last year. They also changed some other rules to try to spice up the on-field action. Major League Baseball’s playoffs start Tuesday, meaning it’s the homestretch of a season that brought a big change to the world’s oldest professional team sport: To correct a long-term decline in attendance, the big leagues used a clock in an attempt to make games shorter for the first time in their nearly century and a half-long history.
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