Unexpected Benefits?

NBA Commissioner Adam Sliver, thinking out loud the other day, mused about how to make his sport's game broadcasts look more like a video game, with things like onscreen stat windows and such that are linked to the player. He thinks that would be a way to draw more eyeballs to those broadcasts, or at least keep folks from tuning out.

Aside from the clutter making it harder to watch the game, Silver overlooks a significant difference between the video game screen and the actual game screen: The former features action controlled by the viewer, which makes the real-time stat windows important to gameplay. When the clock ticks down, you want the ball in the hands of the best shooter and stopping to check a stat sheet kind of mars the flow.

But an actual game is not controlled by the viewer, shouted suggestions at the TV screen notwithstanding. So the stats will just clutter that screen.

I feel pretty safe about baseball either way, though. If the idea is to try to keep the attention of modern microscopic attention spans by clogging things with information, baseball should be safe. Its intermittent activity and measured pace would mean that the stat windows would stay stationary for most of the game -- and they would probably be taken down after not very long because baseball resists efforts to bring artificial excitement to that pace. We can hope that perceptive folks would see this before such an idea is tried and we have to put up with it before its inevitable disappearance.

Of course, Chief Baseball Officer Joe Torre is known for supporting stupid ideas for changing the game, so we may have to endure the experiment anyway.