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Whopper of the Week: Major League BaseballWhat's the matter with being America's pastime?

By Timothy NoahPosted Friday, March 29, 2002, at 7:29 PM ET

"Any way you measure it—viewers, players, spectators—baseball may very well be the most popular sport in the world."

—Advertisement placed by Major League Baseball in the New York Times, March 29, 2002.

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"The Encyclopedia of World Sport says that more men and women play and watch soccer worldwide than any other sport."

—Douglas S. Looney, Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 19, 1999.

Discussion. Regrettably, Chatterbox doesn't have a copy of The Encyclopedia of World Sport to hand as he writes this, so he's taking a small risk here. But the folks at Major League Baseball have left themselves especially vulnerable by inviting challengers to measure popularity anyway they like. Chatterbox can report that when he entered the phrase "world's most popular sport" on Nexis and on Google, he came up with nothing but references to soccer and "football," which is of course what they call soccer outside the United States. Chatterbox is always delighted to learn that some notion firmly embedded in the conventional wisdom worldwide is erroneous, but he doesn't think that's going to happen this time out. Still, if any readers do have plausible data to support Major League Baseball's claim, they are invited to submit it to "The Fray."

(Thanks to reader Jonathan Portes.)

Got a whopper? Send it to . To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

Whopper Archive:
Mar. 21, 2002: Billy Graham
Mar. 14, 2002: INS commissioner James W. Ziglar
Mar. 8, 2002: Robert Zoellick and the U.S. steel industry
Feb. 28, 2002: Al Sharpton
Feb. 22, 2002: Olympic skating judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne
Feb. 14, 2002: Kenneth Lay
Feb 8, 2002: Enron spokeswoman Peggy Mahoney
Jan. 31, 2002: Monsanto
Jan. 24, 2002: Linda Chavez
Jan. 17, 2002: George W. Bush
Jan. 10, 2002: Simon & Schuster
Jan. 4, 2002: The Associated Press

(Click here to access the Whopper Archive for 2001.)

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

COMMENTS

Reader Comment From The Fray:

Chatterbox seems correct to me about the superior popularity of soccer/football, especially given the stupidly broad way the baseball people have phrased their claim. Nonetheless, baseball might be able to come up with a shred of justification. See the U.S. Statistical Abstract here. Charts 433 and 436 suggest that baseball has way more total spectators than football (U.S. football) in the United States, even though football is commonly thought to be more popular. The reason is obvious, when you think about it: baseball's season is so long and has so many games that even though each game has fewer spectators the total is pretty high. It's possible, I suppose, that the long baseball seasons in places like Japan and Latin America do the same thing, and build up such a bulge that the actual greater worldwide popularity of soccer is masked on the total-attendance measure. For what it's worth, when I lived in Italy and Mexico those countries, too, had oddly long baseball seasons. I always remember being surprised at the size of the attendance figures there, even though both nations are dementedly passionate about football (soccer).

--Charles C. Mann
Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly

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