A contributing factor is the absolute iron grip on the trademarked terms, such as World Series and Super Bowl, where every media outlet is 100% forbidden under pain of waterboarding, lest they utter these two words in proximity, whether for free or to promote a party or product or gathering event.

So ultimately, you wind up with a media environment where nobody but the licensee is willing to admit that these enormous sporting events exist. Of course, the licensees themselves are sending a firehose of coverage by every available medium, and those who are in-the-know, and wealthy enough to subscribe, are hanging on the every word of ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPN9 with the play-by-play.

You can be sure that my father was watching every pitch and every out from his armchair, until his beloved Padres got left behind, yet again. San Diego Padres are another franchise that has never won a World Series. They are joined in the record books by the Rockies, the Mariners, and of course, the Tampa Bay Rays.

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.

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.

Soccer is a slow burn where a game is always standing on a fragile equilibrium. Football and baseball are mainly boring because they are turn-based, with long periods of nothing happening between brief action moments.

Basketball is the only dominant US sports that matches soccer in terms of excitement and teams standing on a fragile equilibrium. Of course the NBA screws this up by stretching finals games into 7-game series, capping soccer-levels of excitement derived from winner-takes-all tournaments. It's no coincidence that NCAA tournaments manages to build up so much attention and such a dedicated following.