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.
[–] davidd_1004 1 day ago
[–] justinrstout 1 day ago
[–] jmyeet 1 day ago
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-...
[–] justinrstout 10 hours ago
This is specifically the appeal of in-person MLB games; it's no problem to get a group together: school, church, friends, family, or what have you, and roll up to a game on relatively short notice and have a low-stress experience. In this way it's in the same category as a museum or theme-park sort of outing.
Is it economically optimal? Maybe not, but I also don't think the product is trying to attract the same audience that's willing to engage in a high-coordination and high-intensity event like an NFL game. I know both folks who love the spectacle and effort of the NFL experience and folks who like catching a baseball game with their group when they have a free afternoon, and they don't really overlap.
[–] autoexec 1 day ago
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.
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.