by Dennis Bloom

Created on: February 19, 2009   Last Updated: October 15, 2009

The deterioration of American automakers' ability to compete with foreign competition can be linked with two key reasons. The first is a strong American trait: overconfidence. An analogy can be made with baseball competing with other major sports.

Baseball still calls itself the national pastime, but most Americans probably will say it's football. For about 80 years, baseball was the dominant sport in the United States, and nothing else came close. Then, around 1960, television discovered football, and vice versa. And baseball refused to accept that Americans loved to watch football on TV.

Major League Baseball was so confident with its standing as the national pastime that it refused to adjust, and allowed sports such as football, basketball, and, later, stock car racing to chip away at viewership. The result? The first round of the recent Major League Baseball playoffs were broadcast only on cable television, not on a major TV networks.

Imagine the major television networks not being interested in broadcasting the Super Bowl.

Other sports have instituted things like salary caps and instant replay - because the fans demanded it. They gave the people what they want. Baseball officials, deeply traditionalist, and basically overconfident in their standing with American sports fans, resisted change.

Baseball appointed an owner as its commissioner (now a former owner, but he's still part of the ownership brethren not an independent third party as the seat-holder should be), no parity among teams, the same teams in the playoffs every year, and small market teams losing their best players to free agency year in and year out. The entire league suffers as fans, mostly young ones with long spending lives yet to live, move on to other sports.

Apply that to cars. Lose a young motorist to foreign cars early and you might never get them back.

U.S. carmakers invented the automotive universe, and by the end of the 20th century had a "Big Three" with sales the envy of the world. But they chose to rest on their laurels as foreign competition focused on improving quality and presenting new ideas. While American automakers expended more energy on marketing than fixing flawed products, foreign competition focused in on engineering and buyer personas and very quickly closed the gap.

Secondly, there are labor matters. American automaker unions have become a ball and chain. Yes, foreign car builders have unions. They just are not as shortsighted. Additionally, for example, Japanese

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