Is Baseball Dying?

I coached a couple of my son’s baseball teams and came to understand why we see articles like: Baseball Is Dying. The Government Should Take It Over (gift link).

It will never die, but over the decades I could see it becoming something like boxing with a small passionate niche, but no longer a mainstream sport everybody follows or even knows how to play. From the article:

Attendance at games has declined steadily since 2008 and viewership figures are almost hilariously bleak. An ordinary national prime-time M.L.B. broadcast, such as ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball,” attracts some 1.5 million pairs of eyes each week, which is to say, roughly the number that are likely to be watching a heavily censored version of “Goodfellas” on a basic cable movie channel in the same time slot.

Even the World Series attracts smaller audiences than the average “Thursday Night Football” broadcast, the dregs of the National Football League’s weekly schedule. In 1975, the World Series had an average of 36 million viewers per game; in 2021, it barely attracted 12 million per game…

I perused some of those World Series viewership numbers. The most-watched World Series were those between 1978 and 1982, and four of the least-watched series were in the last five years, with the least-watched being last year.

The average age of a person watching a baseball game on television is 57, and one shudders to think what the comparable figure is for radio broadcasts. Typical American 10-year-olds are as likely to recognize Jorge Soler, who was named the most valuable player of last year’s World Series, as they are their local congressional representative…

In some parts of the country, participation in Little League has decreased by nearly 50 percent in the past decade and a half…

That is what I saw up close and personal. For the last team I coached in St. Louis (a baseball town), the gym (one of the largest in the STL metro area) had to pull a couple second graders and I suspect a fifth grader or two just to field one team of third and fourth graders. Then we had to play teams from gyms very far away – basically the all-white suburbs. We stomped everybody we played, due to superior coaching and what I suspected to be a couple fifth-graders.

Recruitment was a red flag, but then I saw the smartphone generation on the field. They don’t have the patience for baseball, which has long periods of waiting. Waiting for your turn at bat (which doesn’t come in many innings), waiting for the ball to come to you (which may not come to you for most innings). Baseball requires you to be inactive but attentive because in an instant the ball comes your way. And if your eyes weren’t on the ball, you missed it and made an error.

Between streaming and video games, they haven’t had to suffer boredom. The sport requires patience the kids don’t have. It’s also getting hotter outside. Summers in some regions is uncomfortable (in some, unsafe) to be outside under the sun, exerting effort.

When we arrived in Philly midsummer, I touched base with the Y about coaching. I was looking to get the boy on any baseball team. I learned the YMCA doesn’t offer youth baseball anywhere in Philadelphia. It has been discontinued.

One neighborhood boy we play with, an 11-year-old natural athlete (football and basketball), doesn’t own a glove! I had to teach him how to take a step when he swings. It didn’t take him long to pick it up and start blasting the ball, but he didn’t know!

More from that article:

We need to stop pretending that baseball has a broad-based enthusiastic following and begin to see the game for what it is: the sports equivalent of collecting 78 r.p.m. records. Baseball is America’s game only in the sense that jazz is America’s music or that Henry James is America’s literature. It is time that we acknowledged this truth by affording baseball the same approbation we reserve for those other neglected cultural treasures.

Obviously it’s tongue in cheek, but this was the third time I saw a “baseball is dead” piece in the Times. See When Baseball Comes Back, It Should Look Totally Different or Baseball Saw a Million More Empty Seats. Does It Matter?

Preemptive Update

I started this article last year, and changed the title from “Baseball is Dying” to a question. Baseball has enjoyed a small revitalization in my family. My son fell in love with the Phillies and wants to be a pitcher. He says it’s his favorite sport. When that happens, as a dad you get into it to, just like I did with soccer. So we watched the Phillies all year up to its disappointment. We attended a couple games, including one against my hometown team.

My son was a large part, but I regained respect for the sport after playing a couple softball seasons with an old friend’s team. The experience reminded me why I probably quit at 14 years old despite being a cleanup hitter. The pressure is tough to handle. In basketball, the next sport I took up, as in soccer or hockey, you’re burning so many calories you don’t have time or energy to feel anxiety. But in baseball, you wait and wait for the instant you have to perform, and that was nerve-wracking. It’s the ultimate “clutch” sport.

I also like how every player bats the same number of times. Unlike say basketball, where two or three players win a team the championship every year. As in the other giant of American sports (football), it’s athletically a contest of power and speed. There is no need for stamina. It’s all anaerobic performance, and let the women and children have aerobics.

I became anti-baseball in college precisely for that reason. If I were going to play sports, I want to get a good workout and baseball doesn’t really deliver that. But now that I’m over the hill, I’d count the sprints as excellent exercise. Even if you go 0-8 in a double header, that’s still eight 30-yard sprints you have to run (given you don’t strike out in softball). And I would get on base for at least a couple of those at-bats, so I’d have to run more as I go around the bases.

I did so much sprinting I noticed I would never pull hamstrings in other sports or physical activity. My hamstrings have been sensitive since my 30s, but I learned the surefire cure in regular sprinting.

So we’re back into baseball and living in a good baseball town. I’m not pessimistic as I was because I also believe in the scripture that says what has been will be again. The pitch clock is a big help, and baseball will be back.