Comment by jmyeet
3 hours ago
I don't know why people in these comments are dragging politics into it. That strikes me as a terminally online take and I say that as an self-confessed politics frog.
If anything, the following of current events overall is way down to what it was decades ago by the general populace. People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
Three things happened to baseball (IMHO):
1. The childhood funnel is drying up and has been for a long time. Kids now increasingly play soccer instead;
2. Take out the nostalgia and you're not left with much. There are too many games, they're too long and not enough happens. Football is bigger than ever; and
3. Structurally I think baseball made some huge mistakes, such as the soft salary cap system that created dynasties like the New York Yankees who could get rich on broadcast rights for a huge media market. The NFL has managed all of this so much better.
I'm not a huge sports fan but I find the systems fascinating. American sports evolved into a 3 pillar system. Basketball season into baseball season into football season through the calendar year. I wonder if baseball's timing over summer has contributed to this decline.
I don't really understand the "too long" complaint when NFL is the most popular sport. A baseball game is something like 30-45 minutes shorter than an NFL game. And NFL and MLB both have about 10-20 minutes of actual live play each so I don't think "nothing happens" is a particularly good explanation either.
I think the biggest reason is that it's much more difficult to follow as a casual fan due to the number of games. It was fine when baseball was more or less the only popular sport, but now it's competing with too many other things.
I hope it's true that the parity gap due to not having a salary cap is hurting the sport's popularity, but I'm not sure that's true either. The majority of fans root for only a handful of teams who benefit from not having one.
On point 2: in my experience, the tradeoff is that baseball is the most accessible in-person major league sport. The quantity, length, and seasonal timing of games means that tickets are almost always affordable and can fit into my schedule. I go to more and more MLB games every year, whereas a ticket to my NFL team is a serious expenditure, and that's assuming that my schedule works out to where I can attend one of 8 home games for the entire year.
Isn't that making my point? If tickets are cheap and easy to get, doesn't that indicate lack of demand? I'm minded of the (highly entertaining) Scottish "invasion" of Boston during the World Cup recently and they did a march and just went to a game at Fenway Park. That's not something you can just do with other major sports.
I also think about how sports are portrayed or used as dressing in media. Seinfeld, for example, was from an era where people often went to baseball games and knew all the player stats. People in previous generations would take their scorecards to games [1]. None of that really exists anymore.
[1]: https://www.wuwm.com/2023-04-10/this-baseball-season-try-an-...
> I don't know why people in these comments are dragging politics into it.
It dominates news coverage even when we're not coming up on an election, and the high stakes involved makes it an even bigger topic, and one that weighs heavily on people's minds.
> People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
The wealth of information available (and disinformation avilable) is partly to blame. It's easy to spend your time only on a small number of interests. Most people just let the algorithms of a small number of corporations feed them the vast majority of what they consume, so while technically there's a lot more information out there, they only see what those corporations choose to show them.
The NFL and MLB seem to have similar numbers of recent dynasties and of different teams that have won a championship.