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Fight_those_bastards@reddit

Yeah, baseball is ridiculously easy to follow on the radio, because it’s one player doing one thing at a time about 99% of the time.

In any other major sport, there’s action in multiple places with multiple people at the same time. Shit, in football (both kinds), there’s 22 people all moving at once, and it’s hard to describe how a play is evolving in real time, while watching it means you don’t even need sound to know what’s going on.

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Ol_Man_J@reddit

I watch, listen, and play hockey and have for 20+ years. I’m fine listening to the game but even the best commentators are describing a lot of “nothing” plays a lot. Pass to this guy, battle in the corner, etc. and then the pass to one guy can’t describe the person who managed to get wide open in front of the net for a goal. It’s good and I like it when I’m driving but it has limitations for sure. Baseball (minus someone stealing a base) shouldn’t have a lot of activity in the field in the mean time

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Uffda01@reddit

The fact that its easy to just have on is also kind of indicative of a bigger problem.... its largely boring: the best hitters are only successful 1/3 of the time. Playing is worse, there's a lot of standing around unless you're the pitcher or catcher or at bat.

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toomanyracistshere@reddit

Football games also mostly consist of long periods of inactivity, but it's the most popular sport in the country by a pretty wide margin.

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Ed_Durr@reddit

With football, the downtime is generally still quite exciting because of the anticipation of what is about to come. Your team is at 5&3rd on your own 45 while down 4 points with ten minutes left in the quarter. There are a whole bunch of different ways that this could unfold, and you are watching the players get into position to execute any number of plays.

With baseball, every single pitch is a question of "will the batter hit or not?"

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toomanyracistshere@reddit

For someone who is interested in baseball there are the same type of hypotheticals in every pitch. Not just, "Will he hit the ball?" but "Will he bunt?" "Where will the ball be hit to?" "Will they try to get the hitter out at first or one of the runners out?" "Will someone try to steal a base?"

To be honest, I hate football. I find it confusing and needlessly complicated. I always get people telling me, "It's not complicated at all. The team tries to advance the ball to score a touchdown. Of course, they can also floobinflip a snorflop and maybe score a field goal. Or the other team can Saflebasz on their ten yard line to try and go for a safety. And if it's the third down they can kick the ball and try to blipptyblop, but that's really rare. A team would never do that if they have a decent left offensive defensive running tackle back."

I'm joking, of course, and a long time ago I decided to stop being a dick about my dislike of football, because nobody likes the guy who tells people that what they like is wrong. But sometimes my irritation with it, and especially with the culture around it, still manages to shine through. I'm not a huge fan of most other sports either, but I do enjoy casually watching a baseball game every once in a while. And trust me, if you don't follow football, those periods of inactivity are at least as boring as any other sport's.

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levi070305@reddit

The exciting parts are pretty exciting though.

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jiminak@reddit

“It’s boring” is a very common attribute applied to baseball. But you have to amend that with, “these days”. Baseball itself hasn’t really changed all that much (recent pitch clocks and pickoff limits and ghost runners not withstanding). That’s kind of the whole point of OPs post: why is considered boring “these days” when it wasn’t considered boring 50 years ago? Nothing inherent to baseball itself changed to make it go from not-boring to boring, so something external to baseball had to make that happen.

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levi070305@reddit

It's a better in person product than TV product. NFL is better on TV for the most part.

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DDguyfromDC@reddit

Football is boring, .most of the viewing is wating guys in a circle, lol. Until 3 minutes are left and they forego the circle

Probably the fact that it only looks like a duel if you know it’s a duel. This is anecdotal but the only people I know who watch and follow baseball are the ones who also spent a long time playing it. If you know the sport you know exactly what’s going on, but for someone like me who doesn’t it just looks like a bunch of guys standing around most of the time, even if I know that’s not what’s actually happening.

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tenehemia@reddit

Baseball being pretty easily the best sport for radio has a lot to do with how it achieved its status as "America's pastime" in the first place. Football, basketball, hockey, soccer and pretty much every other sport are worse or outright terrible to listen to, while baseball remains pretty great with only audio descriptions.

Now, the current state of MLB on the radio is pretty terrible but that's just because of the constant awful ads and stations and the league doing everything in their power to make sure you can't just listen to whatever game is on. I swear, in 2025 there's absolutely no sensible reason why anyone on Earth shouldn't be able to just listen to any radio station using the internet with virtually no hassle, and yet here we are in the exact opposite situation.

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WildMartin429@reddit

I found NASCAR to be good to listen to on the radio as well. A lot better than watching it on television. It sounds more exciting when the announcers are describing what's happening

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s1lentchaos@reddit

Football probably holds the spot at second best radio sport with the way it's organized into plays it's not terribly hard to follow along with the action and how things are going where most other sports are far worse than football and baseball to try following over the radio.

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tenehemia@reddit

Yeah I agree with that. Football's only issue is that there can be a lot of stuff happening in different parts of the field on the same play and there's sometimes a feeling that the description isn't painting the full picture. Like you hear what the quarterback does with the ball and relevant stuff there, but there's no time to describe how the players are all positioned at the snap, which is one of the more interesting moments when watching football I think.

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cguess@reddit

The MLB app is pretty great for this... except for the ads. Unless you're in the home market it's the same 5 ads over and over and over because no one in New York is going to pay to advertise on the Brewers vs Reds and no one in Milwaukee is going to pay to reach people in New York. You basically get a few online shops.

Cptn_Beefheart@reddit

Is it free?

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cguess@reddit

No, as you can see in the other replies, it's $30 for the audio for the season (every game in the league). If you have T-Mobile though they usually offer a period in March that you can get audio + tv broadcast for free, just gotta sign up in time.

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TinyCauliflower1952@reddit

Do you get the divorce lawyer ads? I get a divorce lawyer ad every single commercial break when I'm using the mlb app. And no I do not nor have i ever had a need for a divorce lawyer. Hopefully it stays that way lol

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cguess@reddit

No, a lot of dog food ads. I do not, nor have I ever, owned a pet. Those ads may be regional too I guess, I live in a place with a lot of dog owners.

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byebybuy@reddit

To your final point: I'm an Eagles fan but I'm not in the Philly area. I'm not going to pay out the ass to buy the NFL streaming service, because I'm not that intense of an NFL fan. Despite football not being great for radio, I'd love to just have the game on the radio while I'm cooking or doing yard work. In fact I'd prefer it so I don't have to have my eyes glued to the TV screen. And yet it's still virtually impossible for me to find the game on a radio stream, even using an app specifically for it. So dumb.

So it's off to the high seas. But the high seas are choppy and laggy and full of edgelords slinging racial slurs.

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as1126@reddit

Consider XM. They may offer a low cost streaming service. Every game, even home announcer option. Very worth it. I use it in three cars and at home via Echo devices. Hockey, football, baseball and basketball all have dedicated channels.

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courtd93@reddit

In fairness, Merrill Reese is a gift from God that makes listening to it genuinely as good if not better. Many of us will even turn off the audio for the national commentators to listen to him and mine quick because it’s better even if you’re also watching.

I think you can get 94.1 WIP on the Audacy app even out in Cali, so worth checking out if you haven’t already.

Go birds.

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byebybuy@reddit

My dad used to mute the tv and turn on the radio so we could watch the game but listen to actually competent sportscasters lol. Maybe that's why I have a soft spot for listening to football games on the radio.

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Semi-Pros-and-Cons@reddit

Cable is dying because of costs. Radio will outlive cable because it costs nothing to listen.

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SaltySailorBoats@reddit

I would argue that hockey radio of the same era was also to baseballs level.....well at least the Montréal Canadians broadcasts.

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Beeb294@reddit

Yeah hockey can be pretty good on the radio.

Unfortunately sometimes hockey broadcasts end up with one of the team's super old timers as a commentator and they get caught up in stories and shit that stops them from actually doing play-by-play coverage. Mainly I'm talking about Chico Resch for the Devils.

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FancyEntrepreneur480@reddit

Baseball on at a local sports bar was about the only way my dad and I could have a serious conversation lol

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mister-fancypants-@reddit

I got into baseball when my first kid was born and i needed something that could be on for background noise for hours at a time. 9 years later, go Mets!

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Suspicious_Row_9451@reddit

What about "second base"? Like, if Michael said he got to second base with you, does that mean you, like, closed a deal? That’s a baseball term, right?

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feochampas@reddit

its a pita to watch some of the games. I live over 400 miles away from Seattle but I'm still in the blackout area for the games. Which means I have to buy one specific television network if I want to watch them.

The NHL (Hockey) strike of 2008 knocked me down from SuperFan to “I’ll check the scores once in a while”.

I couldn’t even tell you the starters for my favorite team (Red Wings).

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Verbanoun@reddit

Same. I followed my team religiously until then. Then I realized my life wasn’t really any different without hockey in it and sort of gave up.

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Expensive-Cat-1327@reddit

Same, though that was a lockout so it was even worse.

I'll support players striking if the owners are screwing them. But nobody should ever support a league locking the players out because some owners are paying players "too much"

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Also, free agency has made it almost impossible for small market teams to compete on a regular basis. As a Pirate fan, that's what has turned me off.

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Low-Locksmith-6801@reddit

So you’ve never heard of accumulated effects? This certainly was a factor in baseball’s decline. When you grow up, you’ll realize that 30 years is not that long - and the love of sports is passed down through generations.

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TheLonelySnail@reddit

No, no, no…. Ugh… it was.

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Maxpowr9@reddit

It's what killed the momentum of the NHL with its entire season lockout in 2004. Course 20 years later, the league is the healthiest its been.

Finally, baseball had a nasty habit of being stingy. All leagues now squeeze every penny they can get, baseball penalized fans for wanting in-depth stats, jacked-up baseball card prices, and catered to the high paying viewer with luxury-boxes and ridiculous parking prices that it became too expensive.

Now I can understand some people like the constant all consuming news cycle. But for me, it makes it less enjoyable to keep up with.

Baseball conversation and news happens in a month to month to years cycle. Football is much less predictable and its news cycle is constant. For me, baseball moments have a higher pay out. Upsets are a much bigger deal because they don’t happen that often. It makes it more interesting. Football is so unpredictable, it’s almost predictable and just sounds like sensationalism.

Different strokes for different folks, but the pace of baseball is a draw and not necessarily a hindrance to audience viewership.

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RedShirtDecoy@reddit

I dont put a lot of effort into following the reds but when a division rival or bigger team comes to town the crowd is always bigger. Especially if its mid summer and its shaping up to be a potential wild card decider.

that makes no single game that important, right?

Depends.

If you're up 12 games in the standings, no.

Behind 1.5 games, very much yes.

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TransportationNo6983@reddit

Even being up 12 games is not a guarantee. Just look at what happened to the Tigers this year. They were up 15.5 games going into September and came in 2nd in the division and barely made it into the post season. Each of those individual games mattered a lot down the stretch.

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-heathcliffe-@reddit

Dont forget the cardinals in 2011, miracle run!

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Tell that to the Mets. They were one game from the wild card this season, and shit the bed. Granted, they shat the bed for a lot of games before that final game, but their season did come down to that final game.

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toomanyracistshere@reddit

I can understand this being a factor for people, but it doesn't really bother me. At least we know that the teams with the best records at the end of the season really are the best teams, and didn't just benefit from one lucky play or bad call.

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ExternalHat6012@reddit

Well truthfully baseball remain the most popular American sport until 1994. Statistics don't lie what killed baseball is America's sport was the 1994 player strike where a bunch of die hard baseball fans got fed up with what they proceed to be greedy players demanding millions of dollars to play a sport and a lot of them either stop the watching it all together or they spent a lot less time watching it and started doing other things.

What killed baseball is America's pastime was the 1994 player strike and it's never recovered.

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SchlopFlopper@reddit

Baseball does go hard in person.

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proscriptus@reddit

I will happily watch any baseball game in person at any time, and I've always loved finding a game on the radio to listen to on a long drive.

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Bear_necessities96@reddit

But still in some other country countries got popular by the time tv came out specifically Asia and Caribbean countries

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TheExquisiteCorpse@reddit

Baseball became popular in the Caribbean long before that. It was actually originally part of a cultural movement in Cuba in the 1800s to intentionally align closer with America to get away from Spanish control. If you were a Cuban patriot you went to baseball games instead of bullfights.

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botulizard@reddit

It was actually originally part of a cultural movement in Cuba in the 1800s

ScuffedBalata@reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Days_(film)

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Same with South Korea- lots of entertainment incorporated into the game.

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FatGuyOnAMoped@reddit

A lot of minor league teams in the US do this, too. They turn it into something of an entertainment event, other than just a game.

That's part of the reason why I'd rather go see a Saint Paul Saints game than a Minnesota Twins game

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That would probably get me to go to a baseball game. It reminds me of the atmosphere you find at soccer matches in Europe, especially England. They have the best chants, IMHO

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FatGuyOnAMoped@reddit

I haven't been to a Saints game in years. Do they still have the haircut/barber chair, or is that gone? I don't really follow baseball so I don't know the particulars these days.

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BroughtBagLunchSmart@reddit

I did my first MLB game in a decade last year and all the stuff they did to speed it up really helps.

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BradleyFerdBerfel@reddit

Every new rule makes the game a little bit worse. If I'm going to spend that much money on a ball game, it'd be nice if it actually took the length of a ball game to play.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

Check out the lengths if games in the first quarter of the 20th century.

Before Yankee Stadium was built, the Highlanders were a tenant of the Giants. The Polo Grounds would have the NL game at 1 pm, then the AL tilt at 3. There was even a term for those late starts: a businessman's special. No lights, yet. Had to get the 2nd game in before sundown. Umpires moved the games along.

BelligerentWyvern@reddit

Basketball too.

This doesnt really track for other "easy to track" sports like NASCAR which was popular before widespread television and remained so and even got more popular after.

NASCAR also enjoys the "lazy day out" social status. Though its sharply declined as of late from its astronomically large base caused by like Cars iirc. Its still more popular no than its arguable peak in the 90s and 2000s before Cars.

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psc1919@reddit

All the stuff about strikes and the leagues greed or bad investment is just so silly in the face of this painfully obvious answer: football is way more fun and exciting to watch on tv for most viewers.

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Alarmed-Extension289@reddit

and it was popular to have on the radio. As far as sports go, it is easy to keep up with on the radio because you can picture in your head how many players are on base....

Yeah you're right, Football just has too much action for radio.

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G00dSh0tJans0n@reddit

It's okay on radio. Lots of people would have the TV muted and listed to Eli Gold give the radio call in Alabama. Basketball or hockey is just too much going on for good radio calls.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

It helps if your system allowed you to sun the radio call and the picture. I once got software that a!loaded me to delay the radio call. Mute the national broadcasters & pot up Howie Rose.

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princess9032@reddit

Not to mention people don’t have local TV setups anymore, even some local games needed cable TV, and it’s nearly impossible to get baseball games if you rely on streaming to watch things

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KevrobLurker@reddit

My team (Mets) is on a regional cable network I can get through Hulu (the plus live TV option. ) MLB app lets me watch the games because I have the local streamer subscription, and the T-Mobile deal.. I am a retired guy who has to watch games, but my Hulu setup allows me to record. YouTubeTV dropped the RSN mid-2023.

https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/mets-sny-youtube-tv-live-streams-baseball-games/bvojohhxvg4wnb6ommc70ucs

There are a lot of hoops to watching your team these days. Some games are OTA via NYC's WPIX-11 and CT's WCCT-20, mostly Friday nights or weekends.

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I_POO_ON_GOATS@reddit

I'd say it's a pain in the ass to find games on TV too. MLB did a very bad job with their TV contracts to supplement each team.

If the local NFL team is playing, then it's on FOX, CBS, NBC, or ABC. The Amazon games are a recent exception, but still very easy to access.

College football for Power 4 teams can be found on ESPN, FOX, CBS, or NBC. Again, easy to find.

My MLB team? They've switched from WGN, to Bally, to FanDuel, etc. The Royals require a different subscription every year and trying to find the games is just exhausting. So now I'm basically a "watch the highlights and keep up with the news" fan these days.

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jcmib@reddit

I think that Football is the sport that translates best to video games as well. With basketball and soccer tied for second. Even hockey, golf and auto racing translates better to video games than baseball.

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LowEffortChampion@reddit

Football is damn near impossible to listen to on the radio

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McBriGuy105@reddit

Even now, baseball on the radio is lovely on a warm summer day outside. Perfect sport for that.

To add on to this, baseball failed to adapt to shortening attention spans in a timely manner. 162 games that until the pitch clock lasted over 3 hours is a mind blowing amount of one sport. Ratings this year are up a lot, and I’m convinced the pitch clock has a lot to do with it because regular season games could be done in 2.5 hours regularly. Puts the timing on the smell level as hockey and basketball.

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MechanicalGodzilla@reddit

I still listen to baseball games on the radio as my main method of keeping up. I’ll watch during the playoffs, but for the most part I am too busy to sit around 5 nights a week watching TV.

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rafaelthecoonpoon@reddit

This. Baseball is a radio and newspaper (or news ticker) sport.

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dathomar@reddit

Also, when I was a kid, my parents would frequently put the our team's games on TV, since they were broadcast over-the-air. Now, they're all locked behind subscriptions online. I took my son to his first baseball game, recently, and he loved it. We got the cheap seats (which actually seem to be some of the best seats in the place), but with transportation, food, and so on it was over $100 to go. We were hoping to throw one of the playoff games on the TV, but realized we couldn't do it like we could when I was younger. I watched so much baseball because it was just on the TV, but he's hardly going to see any.

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cyvaquero@reddit

This plays into an interesting quirk of the fandom where I'm from. We are pretty much dead center of Pennsylvania so the fandom is split Pittsburgh vs Philly and it is more generational than anything (ignoring more recent bandwagoning).

When my dad (Boomer) was a kid TV really wasn't much of an option in such a rural area - so listening to the radio was how he got sports. Despite Pittsburgh being closer, Philly stations had a repeater that reached our end of Nittany Valley so he became a Philly fan. TV stations, more importantly TV stations from the Pittsburgh sports market, were a thing when I was a kid, so pretty much everyone in my generation (Gen X) was a Pittsburgh fan. Now with the past couple decades of cable and streaming the fandom has split out - still probably more Pittsburgh leaning, but Philly made a comeback.

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dhrisc@reddit

Still great for listening to. The announcers have time to actually have a personality and are just generally more down to earth imo, its like hanging with some homies.

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Football field is literally shaped like a TV.

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InterPunct@reddit

Yup. A 19th century game in a 21st century media market.

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TheGruenTransfer@reddit

It's boring as fuck. They need to change rules to pick up the pace. Also concessions are so absurdly overpriced that it's not even fun to go to a game in person.

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A football game is 80 individual chess matches, start to finish, played back to back, with the results of each of those matches influencing the strategy of all further matches. There is absolutely no other sport that requires the same effort to win the mental game; that's often lost because oh by the way they also play with the greatest athletes in human history.

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Ok_Imagination_4374@reddit

Baseball's ratings went WAY up this season. I'm hearing more and more people talk about it too.

Thanks Shohei

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Electronic_Courage59@reddit

And the pace of play is way better. They’ve cut almost an hour off the average game time with the pitch clock, pitching change and extra inning rule changes

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cfbluvr@reddit

yeah the pitch clock change made a HUGE difference

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2_kewl_for_my_mule@reddit

What's the change please? Im not too familiar with baseball

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forwardobserver90@reddit

Big ones are the a pitch clock, think shot clock in baseball, to keep the game moving. Limiting number of pick off moves between pitches, putting a runner on second during extra innings, and some rules having to do with how often you can change pitchers.

The goal is as to increase the paces of play. Games were going to 3 or 4 hours and the league felt that was to long and that they were losing viewers.

I hate the runner on second thing in extra innings but these changes have seemed to work.

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The next closest is NPB (Japanese pro baseball) at 26,681,715.

Then you have

NHL: 23,014,458

NBA: 22,328,190

NCAA Football 21,016,312

NFL: 18,755,380

Premiere League: 15,074,553

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Garlan_Tyrell@reddit

Too many games, as well.

Each MLB team plays 162 regular season games. That’s almost double either the NBA or NHL’s 82 games each, and almost 10 times as much as the NFL’s 17 games.

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DoinIt989@reddit

Every game matters more if your team or their opponent is good. On the other hand, in college football especially, you lose 1 game early in the season, and the whole season is basically over. NFL gives a little more leeway, but it's still easy to tank the whole season quickly. Longer season in baseball means more chances for a comeback story.

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Ed_Durr@reddit

NFL teams routinely make the post season with records as low as 9-8 and 10-7, and occasionally even worse. Here's how long last year's non-playoff teams were still in playoff contention, mathematically:

Titans: Week 14 of 18

Browns: Week 14

Giants: Week 13

Patriots: Week 13

Jaguars: Week 13

Raiders: Week 13

Jets: Week 14

Panthers: Week 15

Saints: Week 16

Bears: Week 15

49ers: Week 16

Cowboys: Week 16

Dolphins: Week 18

Colts: Week 17

Falcons: Week 18

Cardinals: Week 16

Bengals: Week 18

Seahawks: Week 17

I've heard also heard it told that every team wins 54 and every team loses 54, so they could just cut the season down by 2/3 and accomplish the same thing. I don't follow the stats, so there may be some outliers, but it sounds pretty close to accurate.

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slapshots1515@reddit

If teams only needed two starting pitchers, this would absolutely not be the case.

whereitsat23@reddit

Good for retired people. I do like listening to sports on the radio, there’s a feeling to it if it’s a good broadcaster

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baycommuter@reddit

Two of the only cities that like pro baseball better than football are Los Angeles and St. Louis and they had Vin Scully and Jack Buck to listen to.

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20thcenturyboy_@reddit

The LA football teams constantly leaving and coming back has certainly hurt their popularity here. I don't know a single Chargers fan, but know quite a few Raiders fans.

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no-due-respect@reddit

My grandfather did the same thing. Every time we’d go visit, he’d be out on the back porch, listening to the game on the radio, drinking a scotch.

In fact, when I got my first apartment, I did the same thing. Couldn’t afford cable so the only way I could consume sports was the AM radio. Used to sit on my porch every night all summer long listening to my team. It was lovely.

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TacetAbbadon@reddit

And football is pretty much ideal for television. Over the course of a televised NFL game there is more time spent on replays than actual play.

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KevworthBongwater@reddit

and commercials. i dont get how people watch that mindless garbage. its fuckin boring.

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damutecebu@reddit

Football has a period of intense action when the play is run, followed by non-action seeting the stage for the next play.

Soccer has continuous action, but a lot of it is pretty mundane action.

I understand the appeal of both.

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donuttrackme@reddit

I like most sports (but like soccer and football more than baseball by a good margin), and I believe that anyone that likes baseball but thinks soccer is boring has no leg to stand on.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

Metric feetsbol can just add more fake injury time to fit in adds.

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Ironically, it's why I feel soccer is kept down in the US. Not enough commercials to monetize the sport.

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TacetAbbadon@reddit

3 and a ¼ hours of match time, 75 minutes of watching players, coaches and referees walk around and talk to each other, 17 minutes of replays and 11 minutes of total play, made up of an average play lasting 4 seconds. 20 commercial breaks and over 100 adverts

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Adorable-East-2276@reddit

I would disagree that it’s not suited for TV, and more say that it’s bad for widescreen HD Tv.

Watching sudden death overtime in the Stanley Cup playoffs is about as exciting as sports gets.

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donuttrackme@reddit

A sport that’s truly not suited for TV is hockey…

Legend13CNS@reddit

A nationally broadcast college football game commonly last 4 hours for no reason other than commercials, as an example of how intrusive commercials can be.

As a huge fan I knew this on paper, but what really drove it home was the new CFB video games. Users on the CFB sub have done the math on commercials before, but experiencing it for myself through the video games made a stronger point to me. I can play a game in my dynasty mode with 8 min quarters (32 mins of game clock) in like 35-40 mins. The video games have basically the same whole TV commentator and replay presentation as a real game, but no commercials. If you count real life's pre-game ceremonies and half-time length, 2 hours for a game would be easily doable.

the bullpen itself coming into prominence greatly slower the game down

This is what turned me from a "watch important games fan" to a "check the scores fan". Before the new rules it felt like it was taking an entire hour to play just the 9th inning of critical close games.

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SKyJ007@reddit

It’s suited for radio and not for television

This is part of what I think the MLB could learn from Bananaball. They have specific rules that increase the pace of the game and make it more suitable for tv/streaming. No bunting, walks are discouraged, no mound visits (so no pitcher changes mid-inning) and games end at 9 innings or 2 hours - period.

Yes, it's also got a lot of theatricalities to keep the audience engaged (trick plays, contests, costumes, etc,) but my die-hard Dodgers fan dad looked at the rules I mentioned above and said himself that MLB could learn from that.

But in addition to that, bananaball caps ticket prices and openly discourages third-party ticket sales. (typically, standard seats are $30, but max at $40 for games in MLB stadiums). The high cost of MLB tickets can be prohibitive to families, which means kids aren't introduced to the game live as much, and they aren't building new lifetime fans as abundantly.

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CompetitiveBox314@reddit

Not just TV vs. radio, is also easy to recap a baseball game in the newspaper.

in the middle of the season in August 1994 MLB players went on strike due to the expiration of their collective bargaining agreement with MLB. Among the issues was the biggest one which was the fightover implementing a league wide salary cap for players. This strike lasted from August 12 1994-April 2 1995 and only because a federal mediator told players to get back to work under the previous CBA. they didnt actually get one signed until March 14 1997. This strike sowed a deep distrust between fans and mlb who saw it as millionaires and billionares fighting with each other and a sizable chunk of fans walking away from the sport all together.

Influence of parents in youth sports and the dwindling interest from Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha-

this one is the biggest killer of all. In order for a sport to stay healthy kids gotta be interested in it from an early age. Going off the strike it jaded the majority of the Millenial Generation away from the sport for a time although it got a spike in interest during the 1998 home run chase between Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa and the home run hitting spike in the late 1990s and early 2000s but plateaued soon after and cratered after congressional hearings over the use of anabolic steroids and the release of the Mitchell Report in 2007 which listed at least one major leaguer on every team who tested positive for performance enhancing drugs or PEDs. Because of this parents of Generation Z sheppardred their kids towards other sports and activities leaning towards more activities than actual sports due to cost and lack of time for parental volunteering. Gen Alpha on the other hand dosent really like traditional sports as a whole and heavily prefers video games over all else(much to the shegrin of parents).

The astronomical cost and absurdness of youth sports and the delusion of grandeur of todays parents that every kid will be the next Shohei Othani-

For the kids who actually do youth baseball nowadays its a full time job in of itsself. For a long time there were a variety of cheap or free options for kids to play youth baseball. Official little league(the one you go to the official LLWS if youre good enough) was and is the gold standard but there were also city sanctioned leagues, YMCA and Boys and Girls Club teams, High School baseball, t ball ect but due to municipal, school and orginizational budget cuts these gradually were made more expensive or cut all together. Then there are travel ball teams. These are teams that are made up of the best of the best and most if not all require a tryout to make it onto the roster managed by former professional baseball players. These are often made up of kids(some as young as 12) that you take one look at and know they are destined to be major leaguers and spend their summers(and increasingly year round) living in a sort of baseball boot camp where they do nothing but eat sleep and breathe baseball 24/7 and play in showcase tournaments to impress scouts. As you can imagine this is very taxing and expensive on families and some families are putting all their eggs in one basket for their kid to hit paydirt and become the next superstar big leaguer which has a very slim chance at happening. This has a tendency to cause parents to step way over their boundaries between coaches, cause verbal and physical altercations with umpires and even opposing teams parents and act entitled saying their kid is the next Shohei Othani. The part of verbal and physical altercation of umpires has caused an umpires and youth offical shortage in all 4 of the major sports in America.

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cguess@reddit

What team puts you on grass? The minor league team?

MLB tickets for the regular season are still easily had for $12, really good seats you can usually score for <$100, especially on the resale market. Parking sucks, but, for instance, in Milwaukee there's dozens of bars that you can park at and they run shuttle busses for free to and from the ballpark the whole game. Plus you can bring your beer on the bus, so eat before at the bar and you save money not getting hammered at the park too

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DeiaMatias@reddit

Minor league, yes. Milwaukee's system sounds like a great way to spend a day. Booze busses need to be more common.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

I used to take the county bus to the ballpark and back home if I wasn't on a bar-sponsored one. That wasn't free, but a lot cheaper than paying for parking. It was sorta free if I had bought a bus pass that week - unlimited rides.

Bar shuttles were a party on wheels.

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cguess@reddit

*are ;-)

Another good strategy that my dad taught me: If you're going to the game to tailgate but don't want to sit in the ball park (or are just feeling anti social that day), go tailgate, then take the shuttle to the bar for the game, chill at the bar for a few hours, then take it back to meet up with everyone after (or have them come pick you up).

For those unaware, Brewers games are renown for their tailgating. Man Vs Food even came did a major part of an episode on it https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7234682/.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

I used past tense because I moved back East some years ago. I live an hour and,A half train ride from CitiField, where there is no tailgating. I'd watch the Brewers, and boo the Yankees.😉

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RainbowCrane@reddit

This seems like a big factor to me as well, though to some extent it applies to all pro sports, and to any event hosted in sports stadiums. Concerts are also WAY more expensive than when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, as is college football.

But when I was a kid, I lived in Ohio during the era of the Big Red Machine (Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Dave Concepcion) and we used to make a road trip to Cincinnati a few times a year with my Cub Scout troop to see them play. It wasn’t something we could do every week but it was on par with taking the whole crowd of kids out for a big pizza dinner or something. Now a game would easily run $50-100/kid.

When I lived in Oakland, CA around 2000 one thing the Athletics did was have an entire section that you could reserve for group activities - your church group, scout troop, work department, or whatever could get 20-100 tickets at deep discount if you sat in that section and bought in bulk. That actually worked fairly well for maintaining community engagement and “good vibes” towards the team, and put a group of friends having a good time into the stadium to raise the energy

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KevrobLurker@reddit

Group sales are still a thing.

https://www.mlb.com/tickets/group-tickets

I love to see the Mets' Camp Days. All the campers from local day camps and other summer activity programs come in matching T-shirts. You see huge blocks of the kids' various colors in the stands. They cheer like crazy. I never went to camp†, but that has to be one of the best memories. I did go with my Little League team to the old, unremodeled Yankee Stadium. I am a Mets fan, and the AL club had not been improved by Steinbrenner, yet. Still, it was, technically, Major League Baseball.

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morganoyler@reddit

David Stern talked openly about this and his embrace of “viral” clips. The NBA really embraced videos and social media. Stern thought that someone who could watch a bunch of highlights was more likely to buy a jersey or go to a game.

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therealbamspeedy@reddit

Football surpassed baseball long before Twitter and the internet. TV is the answer, football is a better sport for television and the NFL embraced it.

Later on, the player strikes, and the steroid era didn't help baseball either.

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This is also happening to the Olympics. They locked it all down as hard as they possibly could, and now they wonder why kids aren’t that in to the Olympics anymore.

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GreenBeanTM@reddit

The last time I watched the Olympics I was actively rooting against the U.S. because I like Tom Daley 😂

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And also mainly focused on making rich men richer, at the cost of the fanbase, signed - a former A's fan

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Yelling_Jellyfish@reddit

Hard for me to think about decline in the way you're talking here. I see that time as more the NFL rising rather than the MLB declining per se. They were operating in the same universe and the NFL just did a better job consolidating their advantages. Whereas a baseball schedule is a 162 game slog, the NFL had seventeen days that became a social events in and of themselves.

I think that the viral age was a real opportunity to reset the stage and the MLB completely missed it. While the NFL leaned into fantasy football and getting casual fans on board, the MLB actively sabotaged its own future by stupidly protecting legacy media operations at the expense of media that could reach millions with ease. Feels like a common problem with MLB ownership.

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rotorain@reddit

It's gotta be a little of both, I'd like to add that the pace of play wasn't great for modern audiences until the recent pitch clock addition. 50 years ago people didn't have a whole lot to do on any given summer afternoon other than hang out anyways so a 4-5 hour baseball game was perfect. As the internet and TV became more ubiquitous and started expanding hard in the 90s competition for everyone's leisure time got more aggressive so the generally slow pace and relaxed atmosphere of baseball didn't translate well to peoples' modern schedules.

People will disagree but this was a huge issue. Other leagues like the NBA, UFC and WWE used social media and YouTube to rapidly expand their base to foreign countries. Baseball was living in the Stone Age until 2014.

I think many people hit the nail in the coffin. As someone who grew up playing baseball and love it as my #1 sport i understand that baseball hasnt been perfect.

So a few points that i feel killed the sport:

- first off baseball and hockey were the only two major sports from the last 50-100 years. But most americans dont live incold areas so most just naturally graviated towards the warmer sport. NFL existed but it didnt really blow up until the super bowl era. NBA didnt start until like 1947, but it took it like 30 years to start gaining some real traction.

- TV. As Television grew so did basketball and football. I forgot who made this video but there is a video that perfectly explains how moving to 16:9 actually hurt baseball the most. Basically the more screen space didnt make a difference in baseball but it did in footbal and basketball because now you could see what was going on further down the court/field.

- Individualism in other sports grew. Baseball is the one sport that is pretty much regional still. If you were born in boston, you are likely a red sox fan. If you were born in NY you are likely a yankees fan. But it's not the same for basketball and football. People in other sports either follow succesful teams or players. I know people hwo change teams and just follow lebron every few years.

- Baseball is a harder sport to pick up later in life. If you arent taught baseball from a young age, you likely wont pick it up as a teenager. The thing is, it's embarrassing to not hit the ball far or to swing and miss. Baseball humbles you and if you dont love the sport it's hard to keep it up. Basketball and football are sports you can pick up pretty quickly in high school if you never played. If you fail in baseball, kids make fun of you. It's embarrasing to not get the ball out of the infield or to swing and miss at a lob pitch.

- You can't really see athleticism in baseball. There are a ton of athletic plays, but a lot of hard plays the players make it seem easy. In basketaball, a dunk or alley oop is amazing to watch. I remember watching Jackie Bradley Jr play outfield. He made it look easy and was athletic but i play baseball, i can appreciate that but someone who never played can't really see the athleticism in that.

live: Football conditions are often cold/damp where I live, and I just don't want to go stand around outside for that long. Baseball, in summer, amazing. Can get up, walk around, get food, and for the few games I've gone to when it's cold, that's meant the team was in the middle of a playoff run. Hockey: modern arenas are climate controlled, have great sight lines, and have complimentary music, scoreboards, lights etc. It's part light show in other words.

I feel like people who are only into football are missing out a lot on other sports.

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Hyde1505@reddit (OP)

Are there a lot of people in the US who are only into football?

What are some of these innovations NBA or NFL did first?

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One_Recover_673@reddit

I’m referring to the promotion of stars. The NBA did this extremely heavily particularly in the 80s and into the 90s and made investments overseas to appeal to a global market. Don’t underestimate the impact of the dream team in Barcelona.

NFL what’s the first to truly innovate in instant replay and turned their games into events. As for promoting their players, they invested in NFL films, which turned basic highlights into mythmaking creating legends along the way. Fantasy football!!!!

The NFL has never been afraid to experiment. And they’ve always attempted to improve the game itself. Baseball takes itself too seriously is slow to adopt new ideas and when it doesn’t improve the game, it cowtows to more than the other sports.

NFL focuses on rules that promote longer passes and more exciting plays. The NBA put in a three-point shot and allowed dunking. Baseball puts in a pitch clock and makes bases bigger. It just sounds ridiculous and if you directly compare these initiatives.

I grew up playing baseball from five years old till I was 20. I even got to play against a major league. And it is so hard to sit and watch a game but a comparison to these other sports.

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meowmix778@reddit

The steroid era of baseball was blasting stars out left and right. Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa and so on. They tried to make Ken Griffey Jr. a thing. Even past that into the 00s and 10s you had a few big names. Fuck you ARod and Manny Ramirez.

In today's baseball the "big" names that come to mind are xander bogaerts, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Judge FOR SURE and maybe Anthony Rizzo... but they sure as shit aren't anywhere near the star level of your average NFL star or even some NBA player selling shoes.

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donuttrackme@reddit

Shohei is, but that's about it.

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One_Recover_673@reddit

Imagine the best player in your sport is in Los Angeles and he’s about as clean cut as Tim Tebow putting up all time great statistics and you don’t put any kind of national campaign around the guy. They could’ve really built something around a trout versus Mookie Betts campaign.

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donuttrackme@reddit

*Anaheim/OC/SoCal. Definitely not LA.

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One_Recover_673@reddit

Ya and the Cowboys play in Arlington, but they’re not in Dallas, right? The Braves play in a different county than Atlanta.

So what. As far as the general public is concerned the angels represent LA wouldn’t you think or do you think if you did a survey people would actually call them Anaheim?

NFL needed a star got Namath. NBA got Magic and Larry. Madden cover became a thing. Dream Team. Both made the draft an event.

Once it clicked those leagues put the gas down.

Baseball went all Blockbuster Video mode. not only are they late to the game. I’m pretty much everything. They also copy what the other sports are doing when it may not even make sense.

The baseball draft is not an event. The hockey draft is also not an event, but at least they tried and went to the sphere.

They built up those stars, but then those stars were torn down. Who is nostalgic for Sammy Sosa these days? He's more of a punchline today. Or would be, if the general public remembered who he was.

Griffey was a thing... until he went to Cincinnati and was forgotten about for almost a decade.

Legacy season ticket holders for the Milwaukee games still get 2 regular season games at Lambeau. The whole state is treated by the league as one media market.

MKE had its own NFL team for part of the,1920s.

Inevitable-Store-837@reddit

Can't speak for the rest of the mlb but when the Mariners switched from having games on network TV to needing a paid cable package I lost interest. I'm still at a fan but went from watching 40-50 games a year and going to 10-12 to watching zero and going to 1-2.

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ASingleBraid@reddit

I find it so dull I rarely watch it.

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Sad_Impression499@reddit

"The following broadcast may not air with the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball."

It’s boring as hell.

Unless you’re pitching or hitting, it’s just 8 other guys standing around for 4 hours. Especially these days when it’s home run or strike out. There’s no athletic endeavor going on.

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_StillLearning_@reddit

People say slow paced, but attention spans changed. We want highlight reels.

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No_Street8874@reddit

Television

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MonkeyKingCoffee@reddit

Wow there is a lot of misinformation in these answers.

During the golden age of baseball, college football was the most popular sport in the US. The Yale Bowl, the Rose Bowl. All those massive bowls were build just after the turn of the 20th century. The Yale Bowl for instance has seating capacity of around 65K. Yankee stadium had capacity of 58K. And most baseball stadiums were even smaller.

Football predates televison -- AND RADIO. So claims that football was designed to sell advertising on television is preposterous. Yes, the game works better for TV than basketball or soccer. But it was always wildly popular.

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RobotShlomo@reddit

Baseball predates the first college football game. The first professional baseball game was played in Cincinnati in 1869. The first official baseball game using an agreed set of rules was in 1846.

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Francescothechill@reddit

Our attention spans have shortened and baseball is boring af.

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nowhereman136@reddit

part of the problem, in my opinion, is that there are too many baseball games. only in the playoffs does any game feel like it actually matters. its already a relatively slower game compared to football, hockey, and basketball, and to just have seemingly never ending series of games just exacerbates that

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yourlittlebirdie@reddit

MLB became incredibly greedy while also failing to nurture the next generation of fans. Moving so many games to evening/night meant more as revenue but also meant kids couldn’t watch.

Still can be if you don’t care where you sit and want to minimize your expenses as much as possible.

You can get cheap seats to games, and most parks allow you to bring your own food (within reason).

MLB became incredibly greedy while also failing to nurture the next generation of fans.

Then they tripled down on this by goring their minor league system, eliminating tons of teams from small markets.

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KevrobLurker@reddit

The college game is getting more important, limiting the number of players requiring development in the low minors. BITD prospects who spent any time playing in college were rare.(Lou Gehrig, Frankie Frisch) With NIL $, I expect we will see more high draftees out of high school spend at least a couple of seasons playing NCAA baseball. If a kid of mine faced that choice, I'd at least want a set-aside in a trust of enough funds to pay for his education if he had a career-ending injury.

My late father was told to turn down an offer from a mInor league team when he graduated high school in 1937. Grandma wanted him in school. He played 4 years of college baseball & basketball. He was drafted in 1941, by Uncle Sam. When he was demobilized in 1946 he was no longer a prospect. 😉 He did coach high school ball & was a bird dog scout.

In the 1960s & 1970s my Dad did take the whole family to at least one Mets game each season. All 11 of us would have 1 stadium hot dog, but Mom would have brought cold meatball and/or ham sandwiches along with cans of soda that had been in the freezer, and wrapped in foil. By the time we drank them they were liquid, but still cold. Dad either drove us in the station wagon or we took a coach bus with others from our area. The group sales people got our village's "night" on the scoreboard. Those trips were fun, all Mets fans together.

I remember when Miller Park/American Family Field opened that the Brewers' management said that their already important group sales boomed. One reason was that there would be no rain-out The other was that dates they couldn't sell in April & May became desirable, as even on dry nights County Stadium might require dressing for a Packers game.

One way we enjoyed baseball on the cheap was to attend semi-pro games, called "town ball" on Long Island. My Dad had played in those leagues when he was young. There were no tickets, but franks and sodas were sold. I think a hat was passed between innings. Games were at the local high school field. Players who still had HS or college eligibility could not share in the donations. Sometimes one of my Dad's old high school players was on one of the teams, and they caught up. Everybody in our county seemed to know my Dad, and they almost always called him Coach.

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MattieShoes@reddit

while also failing to nurture the next generation of fans.

Attending a game also became prohibitively expensive and that’s a huge part of the experience - just going and enjoying the leisurely pace of the game.

I don't like baseball. Unless I go to a game. It's too boring to watch on TV for me--or at least it's not interesting enough for me not to get distracted by something else. There's a minor league team nearby me that I usually go see once or twice a year, which is cheaper. But it's also awfully HOT during the season here. We went to two this year & it was in the 90s both times

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StoneBailiff@reddit

This! Growing up my family didn't have much money, but my father would take us to baseball games because it was affordable. Recently due to nostalgia I took my own son to a game. I couldn't believe how expensive everything was! Parking alone was $70. Not doing that again.

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SpacemanSpears@reddit

None of that is unique to baseball though. As far as professional sports go, baseball is still the most affordable and accessible for the average American. And it's not like the MLB is uniquely greedy compared to the NFL or NBA. Those groups have the advertising budgets they have precisely because they were also greedy and sought to maximize profits. If it's an argument of affordability, baseball should be the most popular sport.

lol no it won't. I have been hearing this shit for 30 years at this point. Americans do not care that much about soccer. I have never met an American whose favorite sport is soccer. The MLB's revenue is like 8X the size of MLS revenue.

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geoff7772@reddit

MLB is decreasing. Wait until the World cup

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MetalEnthusiast83@reddit

World Cup is great, but our league is painfully boring and nobody cares about the MLS. Outside of the east coast, it's hard to follow EPL because games aren't on live.

Hyde1505@reddit (OP)

Do you think baseball would increase its popularity if they would significantly shorten the season? So let’s say, playing only 40-50 games instead of 162.

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Courwes@reddit

Yes

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Argo505@reddit

You don’t actually like baseball, do you?

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Emergency-Bake2416@reddit

Nobody wants that, so it's a nonstarter.

MLB sold 71 million tickets last year. NFL sold 19 million. Having ten times as many games scheduled has some benefits. But it's really television where NFL dominates - a nationally-broadcast regular season game can have twice as many viewers as even the most anticipated World Series games.

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rap1234561@reddit

It’s not as accessible. Most Americans are off work and lounging around the house Sunday afternoon. It’s kind of the default lazy day literally called for by god. Baseball has over a hundred games a year many of those being midday during the week. It is also not on antenna tv for free like the majority of football games. To be an active football fan you need 3 hours on Sunday afternoon and a tv antenna. For baseball you need 16 hours throughout the week a lot of it during working hours and in many markets $100’s in subscriptions per season.

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ShakataGaNai@reddit

It hasn't adapted to the times. Football and Basketball have. Basketball by being faster paced and more "interesting" overall.

Banana Ball is proof that you can innovate and make things more interesting. And TONS of people are watching.

Nothing stays stagnent forever. Cultures changes. Peoples desires change. Look at music. Every so often a new genre or take on music takes over. Most people don't listen to classical any more.

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PeriliousKnight@reddit

Baseball is boring. Watch soccer instead

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VinnieVidiViciVeni@reddit

It’s boring, TBH

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RikkiLostMyNumber@reddit

Advertising. Football is perfect and predictable for commercial advertisements.

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A lot of the reasons

As many have stated, it was perfectly built for the radio. The segmented nature of the sport made it easy to follow by voice.

The rise of TV at first was not an immediate blow. But what did change was both basketball and football changed their sport to be more of a spectacle and a made for TV product. Think the "Showtime" Lakers or the "America's Team" Cowboys. The cheerleaders (yes sex sells), the celebrities, the bright lights, the logos. Both sports changed rules to make the games faster and quicker. For example, the NBA introduced the 3-point shot in 1979 and the NFL made the sport more passer friendly. Baseball for the most part didn't adapt.

Related to the topic above, are the stars. Both Basketball and Football evaluated their best players into mainstream superstars that even casual folks will recognize them, creating this media attention feedback loop. One great basketball player or one great football player can single handedly carry their teams to success. But the way baseball works, it is almost impossible to do so. Therefore, no stars == no mainstream interest. No better example than Mike Trout for most of the 2010s.

gmanose@reddit

For me it just moves too slow.

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Individual football games get more viewers than an individual baseball game.

Sports betting has been legal for almost 10 years now, if that's what caused the bump would we not have seen it happen years ago? I'm not saying it's not part of the increase in viewership, but saying it's the only reason is simply wrong. Plain and simple is that the MLB is catching up to the NFL and NBA with it's marketing. People are excited to watch superstars and the MLB is capitalizing on that. Same thing happened in the 2000s (just this time everyone isn't juiced up).

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Cheap_Coffee@reddit

I've no clue.

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MyUsername2459@reddit

I think it got substantial benefit from being the first large-scale organized sport in the US.

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Latranis@reddit

Beyond the radio/TV thing, not to mention how much the US government props up the NFL through subsidies, baseball is more boring for most people. Football encourages a certain amount of bloodlust that baseball doesn't, and bloodlust is what helps an aging accountant or manager cope with a mundane existence.

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No-Donkey-4117@reddit

Americans developed short attention spans. Football and basketball are exciting, with something happening on every play. Most baseball plays are routine, and it can take 5 or 10 pitches for the batter to even put the ball in play.

Plus watching your football team once a week is easier to keep up with, and the games become bigger events. Baseball is really only an event on opening day and in the playoffs.

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Panthera_014@reddit

it's boooooorrrrrrinnnggggg

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Fit-Rip-4550@reddit

A lot of it is gambling. Fantasy leagues for football just worked better.

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LooseyGreyDucky@reddit

Nobody has the free time to follow a sport in which each team plays hundreds of games that last all damn day.

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Kabraxal@reddit

Mixture of a slower paced game not being as loved in modern society and analytics making the sport unwatchable for a 15-20 year stretch that the league is only now escaping from.

Nothing you wrote is remotely germane to comment you’re replying to.

misogyny isn't the reason baseball has been replaced by American Football.

This is the closest you came to being on point but it amounts to an underinformed “imo”

It’s pretty clear from your initial comment and this rambling false narrative follow up that you are ignorant on the history of baseball.

And that’s fine. But it’s not hard to spend 5 minutes to learn how and why a female baseball league that existed at the sports beginning faded 30 years later due to social pressure.

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davdev@reddit

> Other than that, fine game that most young people would rather not play.

Between baseball and softball, 2.2 million kids play each year. That second to only basketball, which gets a massive boost because significantly more girls play basketball than softball.

Youth baseball is absolutely massive. Little League participation is dropping a bit, but organizations like USSSA and Perfect Game have huge numbers as the more talented kids leave town based leagues and join travel programs.

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DateInteresting3762@reddit

I use to play baseball, and holy shit that shit is boring.

You sit around doing nothing most of the game. I played 2nd and 1st base a lot. Even then, you just sit and wait.

The game being a pitcher's game kinda sucks. The better the pitchers are, the less baseball is actually played.

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ilyazhito@reddit

I both agree and disagree. I was a player and an umpire.

As a player, I agree that the game was boring. When I was in the outfield, I would wait until the ball was hit to me, then try to make a play whenever the ball was hit in my direction. I preferred catcher, because that position allowed me to stay engaged, call the game, and see all the different pitches that my pitcher had in their arsenal.

As an umpire, I wanted batters to put the ball in play so that I would stay engaged in the game. When pitchers are bad, the ball does not get put into play as often. Instead, there are many walks. This means that most innings involve me moving from A (the position about 15-18 feet behind 1st base on the foul side of the 1st base line) to B (the position on the line between the mound and 2nd base, to the 2nd base side of the mound) to C (the same position, but on the shortstop side of the mound) and staying in C until the inning ends. I haven't encountered very many situations where I would use the rotations I was taught for a crew of 2 umpires, so most games where I was working as a base umpire got repetitive after a while

As the plate umpire, I would have to make decisions on every pitch, so it was easier to stay engaged. As a base umpire (1st base in a crew of 2 umpires), I would have to wait for the ball to be put in play if there are no runners on base. With runners, I would monitor their actions and assist in calling balks, but there isn't that much contested action on the basepaths at the 13U/14U level of travel baseball, because most catchers don't have an arm strong enough to consistently challenge runners attempting to steal 2B on a regulation-size field with 90 foot basepaths.

In a crew of 3 umpires (plate umpire, 1st base umpire, 3rd base umpire), I was more engaged, because I had to monitor the action and my partners. In a 3-umpire game, the plate umpire and both base umpires would rotate at times depending on the scenario (extra-base hit with no one on base, batted ball to the outfield with a runner on 1st base, runners on 1st and 2nd with a fly.ball to the outfield with fewer than 2 outs), because an umpire would have a conflict in responsibilities. If an umpire went out to rule on a trouble ball, the other umpires would have to revert to 2-umpire mechanics. Unfortunately, I would only work a handful of 3-umpire games per year in the high school playoffs, so I wouldn't have enough 3-person games to truly get comfortable with it.

I tried to move up to get more challenging games and/or more 3-umpire games, but my assigner, who assigned both college and HS baseball, told me that he wants ex-pro rather than amateur umpires working college baseball. This meant that I didn't see any chances to advance, so I gave up umpiring high school baseball to focus on officiating other sports.

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dangleicious13@reddit

I use to play baseball, and holy shit that shit is boring.

TheKiddIncident@reddit

First, I love baseball. Played it as a kid, season ticket holder to the SF Giants.

However, you have to understand that baseball is amazingly boring on TV unless you really understand the game. It doesn't surprise me that casual fan gets bored and doesn't watch every game.

Other sports like Football have made huge changes to their game to make it more TV friendly. Football was practically designed for TV with built in TV breaks and everything. The referee gets on the microphone to explain what is happening, etc... Basket ball is a very fast game with tons of scoring. Lots of replays, etc. Again, a TV friendly game.

So, not terribly surprising that baseball has slipped.

EnvironmentalSmoke61@reddit

Because it’s incredibly boring is the main reason

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Lazy_Hyena2122@reddit

The strike in the 90s really hurt them

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p0tty_post@reddit

It’s boring

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Icy_Profession7396@reddit

It's boring.

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dc0de@reddit

Cost drove me away: ticket prices, concession prices, and long drives to the stadium.

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Lethal_Autism@reddit

Football is fun to watch because its more chaotic and violent

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im_in_hiding@reddit

Like all sports, it became too hard to watch.

Cable became expensive. Then they started restricting the airing of some games. Then it was unclear what channel games would even come on consistently. Cable and networks sometimes just randomly wouldn't renew their contracts. Streaming became a thing and now you need to pay for a different streaming service to watch different sports. And then streaming prices keep increasing to the point where it's just cheaper to have cable.

So I just don't pay for or watch anything at all anymore.

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Minute-Of-Angle@reddit

As has been mentioned, the style of game really benefits from being physically present. It doesn’t translate to television as well as football does, which is what has largely supplanted it.

To appreciate it, you really have to understand the lineups, the personalities, the history of the matchup, since it is essentially a series of duels between the pitchers and the team of batters. If you don’t know that backstory, it’s just kinda boring to watch.

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m4bwav@reddit

Its super boring to watch if you aren't getting wasted, but that goes for a lot of sports.

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Essex626@reddit

Baseball ruled when having a game almost every night was a strength--when putting the radio on in the evening was a common pastime, or when the TV only had a few channels to watch.

In a time when watching the same thing every night is much less common or appealing, football has the edge, because a football game is an event if that makes sense.

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Predictor92@reddit

here the thing, baseball used to be an event when it came to September when the playoffs were limited, expanding the playoffs ruined that(w

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YetiMoon@reddit

It’s extremely boring

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goldenrod1956@reddit

Player strikes did it for me. Covid didn’t help.

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wismke83@reddit

The emergence of TV as a primary method for viewing sports allowed the NFL to become the dominant sport in America. The rise in popularity of pro football and the decline in popularity of professional baseball started in the 1970s, and the merger of the NFL and AFL. The NFL embraced TV and in particular TV rights as a centralized organization much than the MLB. MLB’s more fractured structure for television rights, essentially leaving it up to individual teams to negotiate local deals likely, hurt the league relative to the NFL. The NFL was able to broadcast to a wider audience than MLB, particularly on a national stage. Distribution of money from tv contracts from the NFL also helped ensure revenue parity in terms of media rights.

The NFL has also benefitted from what I would say is better labor relations with its players than MLB. While there have been strikes and lockouts in the NFL, I think overall management and NFLPA have been able to come to agreements that don’t negatively affect the league brand and perception of players, like what happened in 1994 when the MLBPA’s strike canceled the World Series, or when the season was shortened in 1981 which cancelled games. I’m not saying that the NFL and its players haven’t had issues, just that no one still talks about the 1982 or 1987 NFL strikes, but people still remember the 1994 MLB strike and point to that as a reason they no longer watch games.

I do think it will be interesting to see if the NFL can hold its popularity. Fantasy football, and betting have helped keep interest and I think helps draw in fans. But fewer kids are playing football (likely for health reasons). I also think fans are still coming to terms with football’s negative impact on players health, and maybe attitudes will change.

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Prior-Lab7130@reddit

One take I have is that Americans are violent in nature. And trending to accept more and more violence as entertainment. Look at the Power CTE I mean Power Slap. Look at the explosion of mainstream bare knuckle fighting.

Baseball isn’t violent like American football is.

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Positive-Avocado-881@reddit

As a lifelong baseball fan, I think there’s a lot of factors. For people around my age, I think it’s way too slow paced to keep their attention.

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jmcdon00@reddit

Not enough violence, America loves violence.

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ArtemisQuil@reddit

Football took over once television became popular because it’s a real made for TV sport. Baseball, though entertaining, can be kinda slow in comparison.

Baseball plays 162 regular season games. Many of which are on Tuesday afternoons at 1pm. Even the most die hard superfan is going to miss some games, just because of life. It also takes some of the urgency away from a loss, a losing streak etc.

That number of games also makes it very hard for a casual fan to keep up with how a team is doing. If I’m a Springfield Football Fan, I just need to know they play once a week and if I go on vacation, I might miss the game but still find out they lost. If I’m a Springfield Baseball Fan, I might go on vacation and find out they had a losing streak and lost 5 games.

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photonynikon@reddit

Baseball is ALMOST as BORING as golf.

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Horangi1987@reddit

Football - college football being huge has gotten people super invested into the college stars and watching them on through to NFL. Kind of same for basketball, but definitely much less so for baseball.

There’s lots of factors, but I personally get bored and lost in the deluge of minor leagues and the way one goes up to MLB.

Mid century boxing became more popular.

Television changed how people viewed sport and how sports gained popularity.

Strikes, scandals, and competitive leagues have hurt sports.

In the 70s you had nhl vs whl, nba v aba, in 80s usfk vs nfl, and now liv golf vs PGA.

I would not invest in ngl because the injury ticks are going yo have players choose other sports.

Its why soccer hasn't grown because better pure athletes give gone hk a sports that pay well.

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GeauxCup@reddit

Have you ever been to a baseball game?

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BoS_Vlad@reddit

IMO the biggest factor in baseball’s decline has been the lack of space for kids to play it in cities. There doesn’t seem to be the same amount of sandlots and ball fields for kids to play on.

Most of the open spaces in cities have been developed and built on. I believe the lack of African-Americans playing in the MLB can be directly attributed to the decline of open spaces in cities being replaced with basketball courts for recreation. It’s much easier to build basketball courts in inner cities than baseball fields. The cost to play is also far cheaper because all a kid needs is a pair of sneakers and another kid with a basketball. No fairly expensive gloves, bats, catcher’s gear or spiked shoes required.

Also most of the inner city ballfields, where they do exist, are booked well in advance by Little League teams and other organized baseball clubs. No longer can a group of kids show up at a vacant ball field on a Saturday morning and spontaneously be allowed to choose teams and play.

I’d guess roughly 5%-10% of MLB baseball players are African-American because of the inner city dominance of basketball as the primary sport which is perhaps why most of MLB players are Latin American and Asian.

Lastly, MLB has shot itself in the foot by playing Playoff and World Series games so late at night when kids can’t stay up to watch them. Hell, it’s hard enough for adults who have to work the next day to stay up to see a complete game that doesn’t start until 8PM or later let alone kids. MLB has lost perhaps 2 generations of potential fans by not playing day games. I remember sneaking a transistor radio with an earphone into school just to hear updates from my team’s PO and WS games and watching day games on TV on the weekends. MLB has no one to blame but itself.

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TheTooz72@reddit

Because of the changes and the rich teams stockpiling the best players available. It's hard to compete with teams that shell out big bucks like the Dodgers and Yankees. Who wants to watch that every year besides their fans?

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ehy5001@reddit

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frank-sarno@reddit

Baseball was never really part of my childhood. In NY in the 70s I remember seeing occasional jerseys and hats but it wasn't wild. In Florida, we didn't have a baseball team until much later so football was the main sport. Even in high school in the 80s, most of the hype was about the football team which played their games at a local college field. But I can't remember ever attending a highschool baseball game.

When I did finally attend a baseball game for the Miami Marlins I had entire rows to myself. But hey, free tickets almost made up for the $20 for a hot dog and drink. <--- And that's why I don't attend baseball games.

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To me some of the rules changes is killing it. Also love pitching duels that not longer are happening because the way it is play today.

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Raggs2Bs@reddit

Football demands much less of your time. If you are just following your team, that's a once-a-week, 3 and a half-hour commitment, almost always on a Sunday. I think that makes it much easier to be a rabid fan. Even if you're a season ticket holder and tailgater, it's still only 8-9, max 12 games a year that you would attend. Baseball has 81 home games, and they are predominantly evening weekdays. That's tough with work and kids, assuming one can even afford it. Much easier to follow closely in April into May, go casual, and check back in in September if your team is still in it.

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KimBrrr1975@reddit

Combination of things.
1. Baseball has been slow to adapt to a changing world. They highly prize tradition, which falls out of favor with younger generations.

They have done some work on this front, but Loooooong game times. When you gotta work or school the next day, having games go regularly 4+ hours makes it pretty hard to attend.
162 games means you feel like you always have time to get to a game. Football with its 15 games or whatever it is, drives a scarcity mindset, which leads to more engagement in this world where attention is prime and ticket prices match. Baseball hasn't learned to capitalize on that and it's been driving consumer and fan behavior for a long time now.
MLB blackout rules and such for watching on tv are ridiculous. Football is everywhere. No matter what service you have, you can watch some kind of football. We had like 3 years where we had no option to watch our local team because of MLB blackout rules. We couldn't even get them on the radio anymore.

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Twilightterritories@reddit

It takes too long, it's too much of an investment in time. We don't have the time for that anymore. Football is just once a week for 4 hours or so to keep up with a team. Baseball it's every fucking day for hours in the summer. Who has that kind of time?

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TheProfessional9@reddit

Boring as fuck

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__blinded@reddit

It’s hard to keep up with the sheer number of games when there is so much competing for our attention.

We’ve also burned our brains out with social media and now have 30 second attention spans.

Football gameplay fits much better into that.

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TalkativeRedPanda@reddit

Because baseball is boring?

We go to a college game every year, and a minor or major league game every few years; but it has to be one of the most boring sports out there. Nothing happens.

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Eggsbennybb@reddit

Listen I love baseball, I appreciate baseball. There’s nothing better imo than watching a June baseball game at Wrigley, beer flowing with a glizzy in hand.

But let’s be honest, most of baseball is pretty boring. Football and basketball have more exciting action that the casual fan can enjoy on television. For football in particular, I feel like all the variables involved make it that every game is a unique viewing experience. For basketball, I think it’s also much easier for the casual fan to appreciate how good the players are. It’s not hard to see how impressive LeBron is when he’s dunking over two guys. For baseball, I think it’s a little harder for the casual fan to appreciate what the guys are doing out there.

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Better_Pea248@reddit

The season is too long. They used to be called “the boys of summer” but now they start in spring and are still playing after my neighbors have their holiday decorations up

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jf737@reddit

Football was made for TV. It’s also rare. You only get to see your team play 17 times. Even less for previous generations. The scarcity of games makes it more “appointment viewing”.

Baseball, you can leisurely follow your team thru the season. Catch some games, follow thru box scores, radio, and highlights. It’s an everyday thing, as opposed to football which is a week long lead up to an event.

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tcspears@reddit

It’s a slow and old fashioned game, similar to cricket but without the global audience.

Just like cricket, it’s perfect for radio or attending in person. Watching on TV isn’t always the most exciting, especially compared to soccer, hockey, American Football, et cetera.

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Icy_Peace6993@reddit

I dunno, other sports rose in popularity, but baseball is still very popular. I think Little League is the largest youth sports program in the world, total MLB attendance of course dwarfs all other professional sports in the U.S. It's becoming increasingly international, with the U.S. being far from a lock in any worldwide baseball tournament at any level. MLB is also more racially diverse than other pro sports, with many of its biggest stars hailing from the most populous areas of the world.

Basketball rose in the Jordan era, but it's fallen off over the past five or ten years. Football is extremely telegenic, but youth participation is falling through the floor because of health concerns. Soccer will always be super-popular worldwide, but it's never taken off in the U.S. beyond AYSO.

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PK808370@reddit

Super boring! But don’t worry, it was also super long, so you got to enjoy the boredom even longer!

Also, too little bloodshed, if I’m being honest - the only real sport-worthy contact leads to some dude walking.

/jk - I feel this way about the sport, but don’t actually think everyone needs to agree with me about it :) and am stoked that there’s different strokes for different folks.

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Natural_Field9920@reddit

It’s boring and not a good tv product

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Entire-Order3464@reddit

Baseball defn isn't 2 or 3. It's further down. NFL, college football, nba all more popular than baseball. Why it's not as popular as it was I can only speculate. But I think it's because the game is too boring and slow for the modern consumer of sports. Games used to take 2 hrs and before the pitch clock they were taking 3 or 4.

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QuinceDaPence@reddit

For me, it's too expensive to go and any time a player gets good and notable they trade them off so it's hard to have any home team loyalty (though that may just be the Astros). Any time I watch them I recognize 0 names.

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Too slow and boring.

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yetanothertodd@reddit

When the NFL offered sex and violence baseball never stood a chance.

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Uffda01@reddit

Others have mentioned tv, and too many games as well as too long a season: its the middle of October and we haven't even gotten to the World Series yet... they could shorten the season by a month on both ends and keep people interested so its not competing with football.

Football and basketball have the advantages that you can play all year around, and there are versions or variations that you can play or participate in with variable number of people while keeping the core principles of the game. ie basketball you can play 1 on 1 or horse, and that keeps the main fundamentals of the game: shooting the ball and dribbling. With football you can still run different routes etc. With baseball you can only play catch, even if you want to play softball - you still need space, and more people to make it realistic.... And when you're playing baseball/softball, there's a lot of standing around and not participating

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gaeuspompeius@reddit

Note: MLB is two leagues, not one

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VulfSki@reddit

Multiple reasons.

Attention spans.

Games were getting too long. And less action packed. People got used to quick action.

Also the cost of going to a game.

Baseball games used to be very accessible to everyone. It was a unifier. The executives and the bus boys would go to games and have a shared interest in the sport.

Just go sit in the bleachers for pretty cheap. Beer and peanuts. Nothing excessive.

Now even with cheap tickets deals, there is parking, and getting one beer is stupid expensive. Taking your kids to a game is now a luxary when it used to be like a standard father son cheap outing. Formative shared experiences.

That's why having so many games a year was such a feature.

But now going is such a hassle. Stadiums have improved in so many ways. But in ways that take away from the game itself.

I am not purist. I'm not s huge fan at all. I get what that happened. Stadiums became more full of amenities and ways to enjoy being at the game as ways to attract more people. But all the extra stuff means more costs and more things to spend money on. Making it feel less accessible.

Every time you add any extra layer of extra on top of doing a thing you lose some amount of people. One thing doesn't lose everyone but it adds up over the years.

That and if you don't have easy access to watch games and keep up with teams it's also less likely you will care.

Now that you need like expensive sports packages from cable or satellite or streaming companies, less people watch it.

You lose viewers you lose people who care.

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Prudent-Thought7750@reddit

The primary factor is just that since the advent of television, Americans can’t get enough of football. The NFL is king, and college football probably draws more eyeballs than baseball as well. Why has football won out? Several factors probably. For one, it’s a lot easier to keep up with football’s 17 game seasons vs. 162, especially since most of the games are on a Sunday afternoon, when people are not doing much.

One thing I think is key is the broadcasting model. NFL games have been broadcast by national networks (Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC) since I think the 60’s. Compared to the regional sports network model for baseball and basketball, you can very easily watch a football game even with just an OTA antenna.

I think the theory that baseball is more engaging on the radio may be true. In addition, many point to “three true outcomes” baseball as a worse product to watch. Essentially, three true outcomes is a term that refers to the modern game focusing on power hitting above all else, meaning most at bats result in a home run, strikeout, or walk. As such, there are less balls in play, fewer stolen bases. Etc. that people point to as a reason for baseball’s reduced watchability.

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MetalEnthusiast83@reddit

It's the second most popular sport in the country. It's hardly dead. People just like football a bit more.

Waaay too many baseball games and games were waaaay too long.

wwhsd@reddit

It’s slow and boring.

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kilertree@reddit

It's numbers have gone up recently but they added to many commercials and took it off free TV.

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Shivdaddy1@reddit

It’s too slow. Kids grow up with short attention spans now.

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allmediocrevibes@reddit

The lack of a salary cap has killed the competitiveness of MLB. The NFL figured that out, why hasnt the MLB? The MLB mortgaged its future for short term gains. Now we're seeing the consequence of that.

I was a baseball junkie as a kid. At this point I haven't watched an MLB in a decade. In almost 40 years my home town team has had a winning product 10 of those years. Why would I support a continually poor product?

In an age of entertainment at our fingertips. Why would anyone want to watch or support a pernernially poor product?

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SquirrelBowl@reddit

Our collective attention span is reduced. Baseball is slow.

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Wadsworth_McStumpy@reddit

Television, no question.

Listening to a baseball game on the radio, you'll have the announcers talking about random stuff, then "here's the pitch, strike two" and then back to discussing the weather, or the city, or the batter's record against this pitcher. That works fine, and you can have the game on while you're working on your car, firing up the grill, or just sitting outside with a beer.

On TV, though, you have to watch, and what you're watching, 95% of the time, is the pitcher scuffing his foot on the mound, or the batter taking a couple of practice swings from outside the box. Maybe the camera pans over the crowd, or takes a wide shot of the field, but nothing's happening. On the radio, you didn't care, because you could do other stuff, but when you're watching the game on TV, you want to watch, but there's nothing worth watching.

Football on TV is different. There's a bit of time between plays, but you can watch the teams line up, the announcers will be talking about the offensive and defensive formations, then the play happens, and you might see a couple of replays of it while they set up for the next one, and then you're watching the next lineup, the next play, there's always something happening that keeps your attention.

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TikaPants@reddit

Have you seen the absolute shitshow that is the NFL? The drama of players lives, drugs, abuse, violence, excess, etc. The fanfare. The commercials. The cheerleaders, the entertainment. It’s a full contact sport that is trying to capture the EU audience now.

I’m not saying baseball doesn’t have some of this but it’s wildly different.

As I’ve heard, “baseball is the thinking man’s sport.”

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bangbangracer@reddit

Arguably, it still has that status. The MLB isn't as big as the NFL, but every town has a local baseball league and the minor league is still seeing lots of local attention.

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RunExisting4050@reddit

Be ause if you arent there at the stadium with friends and beer, its incredibly tedious and boring. If youre literally anywhere else, there are so many other ways to spend your time.

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ddp67@reddit

I absolutely love baseball and always will, however, it has gotten prohibitively expensive to play with all the travel teams, it's damn near impossible to watch it unless you have money, unlike the NFL where you can watch several games on Sunday for free, and lastly, although they've taken great steps last year with a pace of play rules, if you do not know what is going on, it is not an interesting game to watch. Baseball has been around so long that the records really do mean something, unlike the NFL/NBA where they change the rules every two years and records are meaningless, that alone makes it less likely to change.

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Quenzayne@reddit

Football has more and more frequent as breaks, so that’s the sport the networks chose to push.

It’s also why soccer never amounted to much. Very little space for ads.

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Muphrid15@reddit

Aside from other answers, barriers to entry.

Baseball requires specialized equipment (bats, balls, gloves) and specialized fields. Individual talent also matters less than in football or basketball. Many aspiring players languish in the minors.

Football requires just a field. Helmets and pads aren't as necessary in casual play in a park or a backyard. College football acts effectively as a minor league system for the NFL; the best players can go from CFB to starting in the NFL where even the best college baseball players will require multiple years in the minors.

Basketball requires only pavement and baskets. No other equipment required except a ball. The best basketball players could effectively start in the NBA with 1 year out of high school (or earlier if they were allowed).

Baseball still has a much higher barrier to entry and much more uncertain path to making it to the pro level (and therefore paying off the investment in time and money to get there). While many NFL players are in the league very briefly, it still has a lower barrier to get into and a quicker path to making serious money for the very best. The same is true in basketball.

As a result, you can observe demographically who is playing basketball and football vs baseball. These trends apply even within the same sport: aspiring football kickers are overwhelmingly better off socioeconomically because their training is largely self-funded. Teams don't take good athletes and make them kickers; they generally only take people who demonstrate they can kick already. That's a higher barrier to entry.

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LordHeretic@reddit

Bud Seelig

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Iwentforalongwalk@reddit

Because it's boring

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furniguru@reddit

They lost me with the endless strikes and labor problems of the 1990s. I just never followed baseball again

I think everyone has hit on a lot of good points, but I think the slow pace is the biggest issue. People's attention spans are shorter these days, and baseball is a slow paced game. I think that's supported by the increased interest in softball, which is a much faster game despite the name.

Too boring

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Legitimate-March9792@reddit

Too long a game and too slow. Basketball is quicker and more exciting and you can see all the action more close up on TV while baseball and football show the whole field so everything looks far away.

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CriticalSuit1336@reddit

I would maintain that a big part of the problem for baseball's popularity is that it's the only sport where players keep their emotions suppressed (postseason excepted). If you hit a home run and celebrate too much, the next time you bat, you will get a fastball to the ribs. Meanwhile, in the NFL, they have touchdown dances, the NBA has players with trademark celebrations, and even in the NHL, they have cellys. That makes other games much more fun to watch.

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Horizontal_Bob@reddit

Lack of parity

By not having a salary cap, wealthy teams were able to consistently field winners

The rest of the league had to draft well, develop, and then hopefully make a run. But after that run, their talent would likely get poached by the wealthy franchises

This lack of parity made it difficult to attract new fans to the sport.

It also made it difficult to compete with other sports like the NFL because while there are teams that go on runs, for the most part…any team is capable of beating any other team

Look at this season. There’s no dominant force in the NFL.

Just like college football

Anyone at any time could lose

And it engages fans of sport

MLB also plays too many games and the cost to attend games is astronomical.

Fans of football might not be able to go to NFL games but they can afford college.

The NFL and college football also created weekly events.

Thursday football both leagues

Saturday it’s all college

Sunday it’s all NFL

Monday it’s primetime NFL

Baseball has soo many games it’s on all the time. There’s no baseball day where people sit around watching games, having parties

Baseball also plays during the summer, when people travel, they sw, they go to the lake…

But it’s also hot. So you’d think baseball would take advantage of a captive audience sitting in the AC

Nope

Baseball does a piss poor job of marketing itself

Also, go look at a map of teams.

There are massive swaths of the country with no teams. Like the southern US.

Outside of the state of Florida and the braves…there are no teams in the south

So those fans don’t engage with any MLB fandoms. That is why SEC college baseball is so popular

When they should have been expanding and instituting a salary cap to spread out the talent, baseball instead did nothing

When baseball should have prioritized hits and putting the ball in play, they incentivized 100mph pitchers and hitting home runs

Players all swing for the fences instead of just trying to get on base

The MLB is a relic of a bygone era and those who run it are just about the stupidest people in the history of professional sports

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vt2022cam@reddit

There were a couple of strikes at crucial moments where technology was advancing that caused football to speed ahead.

You can read a book and watch baseball. Better cameras helped football, and football has multiple layers with HS and College being highly valued and generating a lot of revenue for their communities.

Profit sharing, many local baseball teams suck. Football has profit sharing and it makes teams in otherwise smaller markets successful (Green Bay and Buffalo for example). The top four teams in football, often change and with a web of rivalries, theses enough interest for almost any football fan to have someone to either root for or at least someone to root against in the Superbowl.

The Red Sox lost the pennant to the Yankees and the World Series is barely covered in the news in Boston. The Super Bowl is still front page news even if the Patriots don’t play.

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meowmix778@reddit

Football is so visceral and engaging compared to baseball. TV undid that. I love baseball. I think it's my favorite sport for the vibes, how relaxing it is. But man is football so much cooler to watch. Even if your team sucks.

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1235813213455_1@reddit

They play way too many games. It's impossible to follow unless your retired.

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lolCLEMPSON@reddit

Because football was invented.

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MeBollasDellero@reddit

We want gladiators in an arena, with death looming.

Not kids trying to hit a ball and cheering when they don't.

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KonaKumo@reddit

Multiple greedy player strikes cancelling seasons that also has really really bad PR.

Prior to recent changes, increasingly long boring games.

Ticket prices went up to going to the ball park is no longer a weekly or multiple times a week thing.

By the way, as someone from Europe I think the US is in a good situation to have multiple popular sports league. In most of europe, only soccer dominates, which also means they can become lazy because they don’t really have competition from other sports.

In the US, there is this competition between MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, which also means all these leagues are constantly challenged to do something better than the others, learn from the others and reflect on themselves.

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jiminak@reddit

That’s also true to a degree. And probably one of many factors that led to the decline of baseball’s popularity. Several other answers in this post are all true to varying degrees and don’t negate the other answers. (i.e. There are probably many reasons, not just one).

But yes, advertising themselves has been done better by the other sports, especially the NFL.

Here’s my context: when I was a kid in the 70s and early 80s, I was a huge baseball fan. I knew almost every main player on every team. I followed my own team religiously, including their entire minor league development system. I read the sports page every day in the newspaper to see the previous nights stats, and I kept a graph paper notebook full of my own compiled stats.

I played fantasy baseball during high school with other like-minded friends. We didn’t have computers to do all of the work for us, so we literally had “game night” every Wednesday where we all got together and copied down all of the stats for the week and computed our standings, traded players, etc.

Somewhere along the way, I lost that passion. I still kinda followed my home team, but by the time I was 30 I probably could not name more than just the superstars from the other teams. But during that same time frame, I knew most players from most NFL teams.

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17144058@reddit

Boring asf. There’s so many games too that they’re borderline meaningless

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Away-Revolution2816@reddit

I would imagine the NFL will eventually go through the same downturn baseball did. I haven't seen kids playing with a football in my area in a long time. Every park usually has some kids doing some kind of soccer activity going on.

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BlueEyedSpiceJunkie@reddit

The attention span of the public has gone down the toilet in the last half century. Read newspaper articles from 1950 and today and watch movies from the same periods.

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Couscousfan07@reddit

Grassroots failure

People watch what they or their kids play

Kids can still play football and basketball at a reasonable cost.

Baseball (and soccer) are ridiculous. Camps, traveling team costs have them sports for the elite.

It’s fucking boring to watch. It might be worse than golf.

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BoyManWombat@reddit

MLB - The pitch clock was big help - for me, baseball became less compelling cause - 1 - it got boring (before pitch clock) 2 - failure to implement a salary cap 3 - the steroid era was BS 4 - the Astros cheating should have had more significant consequences

I still watch - my team had a handful of good years recently but if they go back to their losing ways, I am not sure how much interest I’ll have in MLB going forward

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Fragrant_Spray@reddit

There are many reasons for this going back to at least the 1980’s but let me tell you what I see today that indicates it will continue.

When I was little, I was a huge Red Sox fan. I watched religiously and my parents or grandparents would take me in to 5 or 6 games a year. The games were affordable (and we’d have gone more if we lived closer to Boston). Now, if I want to watch a game in tv, I have to buy a subscription to NESN, which costs more than any other network I’m aware of (about $30/month). I can buy a subscription to mlbtv for less than that and get every other major league game EXCEPT the Red Sox. If I want to take the kids into a game, it’s at least $200 minimum. They’ve priced out a lot of the parents now, so they don’t watch as much, and as a result, their kids don’t either. The fanbase is getting older because they don’t make it accessible to younger fans.

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LawfulnessRemote7121@reddit

It’s basically boring. The amount of time actually spent playing during a ball game is ridiculous.

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mustang6172@reddit

Something about a strike.

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50-100 years ago people would crowd into the courthouse for entertainment because it was an all day affair for something to do.

but let's look at an objective look at baseball. Even compared to other low scoring games (soccer/football depending on where you are from) very little actually happens and it is a very long game. Clocking in at just under 3 hours on average how much 'action' is there to watch?

...almost none. It isn't unusual to have 20 minutes go by where it is absolutely nothing besides the pitcher throwing the ball to the catcher and the batter just stands there and maybe swings once or twice. there is no 'defensive action' happening during this time and the offense is mostly sitting in the dugout spitting.

It is so uneventful that if you go to watch a highlights reel for a game it isn't shocking to see little more than a hit into the outfield and a single 'diving' catch as the only thing that was worth watching

and this comes from someone who literally gets to 'hold people hostage' as they are forced to listen to me ask questions. Generations ago I'd be a local celebrity with a fan base. Today I have to consider 'which of these 50 people will actually stay awake and pay attention for an hour and a half'

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Odd-End-1405@reddit

Boring compared to other sports to watch.

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opbmedia@reddit

Baseball was more accessible since there were so many more games comparatively. But our consumption habits have changed and all games are accessible. Plus Football have few games and each game is individually more important.

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EpicBlinkstrike187@reddit

Football was always gonna pick up steam as it’s a once a week game so everything is more meaningful.

But to watch baseball means you need to have cable or satellite subscription and also pay for their premium package to get the specific channel that shows your team. NBA can be just as bad.

Meanwhile I can watch my Colts every game on my $15 antenna I bought from walmart. Plus I get Sunday night football and usually another game on Sunday from that same antenna.

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