Hockey is a "better" spectator sport and requires more athleticism than baseball.

I agree to go along with my opponents wish to skip the athleticism portion of the debate. I also agree with some of the proposed points on what makes a good spectator sport. The points I would like to address are: A. Crowd Interaction and E. Value. I do not wish to include B, C, or D because they are subjective to the spectator. (People who like slow, quiet and family orientated events would prefer baseball and vice versa for hockey.) Instead, I would like to concern the amount of available action for every spectator. That means, we should suppose that any hockey fan will appreciate the same time he invests watching hockey as does a baseball fan watching baseball. Each is viewing their preferred sport, but the question is: "What kind of return are they receiving on their investment per game?" I will address this value later. First I would like to address my opponents claimed flaws in my argument. 1) Amount of games per season: It is important to include the amount of games per season because it shows the amount of significance each game holds on the season as a whole. In a series of 4 games, each game has great significance toward the total, because each loss would ruin 25% of their series. For example, the NFL has 16 games per season, and losing one of those games is more detrimental to the outcome of the season as opposed to if they had a longer season. Based on percentages, if an NFL team loses a single regular season game, they have lost 6.25% of that season in one game, which doesn't seem like a lot, but lets compare it to baseball and hockey. An NHL regular season contains 82 games in it. If a team like the Detroit Red Wings were to lose a single game, they would forfeit 1.12% of their seasons total chances to win. That means each game is important to win, although it's not as important as an NFL game. A regular season of baseball contains 162 games. It a team like the Detroit Tigers were to lose a game, it would only effect .61% of the season's outcome. That means just one baseball game holds only half of the importance and significance that a hockey game holds for each respective season. Therefore, with less games in a season, hockey games are more significant to the season total. If one were to say that losing a single game isn't that big of a deal, then you could say that baseball games are less of a big deal than hockey games. Another point that my opponent brings up is dramatic game play. Now I agree that because there are less games in a season of the NHL, the game would be inherently more dramatic, because the stakes are higher. I don't agree, however, that you can easily divide the season in to series' against certain opponents, and come out with the same significance per game. Even if we divided the baseball season by two (thus averaging the mount of games per series), we would get 81 games per season, which is comparable to the season of hockey. Now suppose we looked at the necessary time that these totals require by the spectator, because this is what value you will receive from your investment. The value for each game varies. As it stands right now, a baseball fan must invest 2 games worth for the same dramatic feeling of one game of hockey. We will keep that ratio at 2:1 for baseball and hockey respectively. Please keep that in mind when I am finished with my next point. Value is determined by the amount of entertainment received by the spectator. To avoid subjective outlooks, lets pretend Pro and Con are fans who receive an equal appreciation for their respective sports. Pro watches a hockey game and receives 60 minutes (3 periods of 20 minutes) of available on ice action for the 2.5 hours it takes to watch the entire televised game. That works out to be 40% of the game which is on ice action. Since baseball has no structured time limits, I will use the time recorded by Wall Street Journal journalist David Biderman to figure what Con will experience. David timed a typical ESPN baseball rote these results:"The stopwatch would start when a pitcher lifted his leg to begin his pitching motion. The timing would stop when the ball hit the catcher's mitt or, if it was put in play, when the presiding umpire made a call or the players all stopped moving (pickoff attempts and steals were also counted as action). The result is that during these games, there was a nearly identical amount of action: about 14 minutes. To put that in context, that's about 10.9% of the total broadcast time (excluding commercials). It's a fraction of the roughly 88 minutes the players were shown standing around between plays, nearly 45% more than the 10 minutes of replays that are shown and almost four times as much as the cameras show players lounging in the dugout."(1) To sum this all up. Hockey games last 2.5 hours, and contain 60 minutes of action, resulting in 40% action per game. Each game in hockey is 1.12% of the seasons significance. (60 minutes x 82 games = 4,920 minutes of action per season). Baseball games last 3 hours, and contain 14 minutes of action, resulting in 10% action per game. Each game in baseball is only .61% of the seasons significance. (14 minutes x 162 games = 2,268 minutes of action per season). This means hockey spectators receive 4,920 available minutes of action per season and only invest 12,300 minutes, whereas baseball spectators receive only 2,268 available minutes of action per season and invest 29,160 minutes. Basically, hockey spectators get double the action and drama out their sport for only half of the time invested in watching the games, compared to baseball. This is just a subjective argument that I added to nail the point home. I have no references, so I will NOT use these points for my argument. It merely serves as an addendum to my argument, mainly because there is no adequate sources for these points. Although there are more fans that watch the MLB season, it doesn't mean that the sport is better. It just means more baseball fans are wasting their invested time by receiving less satisfaction than what hockey fans receive for the same investment. We can blame the the popularity of the sport on 3 things: The phrase "America's Pastime," the ignorance of Canadian born sports by the United States, and the amount of coverage that ESPN shows each sport during each regular season. Now the phrase "America's Pastime" is misleading. First, pastime means " An activity that someone does regularly for enjoyment rather than work; a hobby."(2) There are far more things that Americans do more frequently outside of work for enjoyment, like defecating. Also, baseball is called a sport, but sounds more like a hobby anyway. I agree with that use of the term. Americans have ignored Canadian sports like hockey for a long time because of the lack of show time on American networks and the lack of air time on ESPN. There is just not enough exposure for hockey in this country for it to be adopt and appreciated like it deserves. (1) http://online.wsj.com... (2) Oxford American Dictionary - also found in google definitions-http://www.google.com...