For your son, it’s just another day. It’s not that I don’t like baseball, I do. It’s just that baseball isn’t the sport that stands out above all the others in my mind.
My family’s story is part of a larger one about America’s waning interest in baseball and generational replacement.
The sport, once the most popular in the country, has a number of problems that have placed it, at best, a distant second in America’s hearts. This is especially true among American youth.
Examining the poll more closely, the problem with baseball becomes more apparent, if not more frightening. Only 7% of those under 30 say that baseball is their favorite sport. This ranked fifth behind football (24%), basketball (17%), “something else” (12%) and soccer (10%).
While the 1994 baseball strike may have affected the sport’s popularity, the truth is that baseball had been in decline for a while. Baseball hadn’t ranked as America’s favorite sport since 1960, when 34% said it was. Soccer that year came in at less than 0.5%, while soccer got 21% support. According to the next Gallup poll on the subject in 1972, baseball was second only to football.
The rise of television
The fact that 1960 is the last time baseball reigned supreme is remarkable. The sports landscape has changed drastically since 62 years ago.
One of the main reasons baseball is no longer the darling of American sports is because of the competition and the dawn of the television age.
After this point, this meant that more than 20 teams had their contests televised, and the country had universal access to the professional game. Also, the Super Bowl would start in 1967. The NFL, of course, is a sport that benefits greatly from being watched. Baseball, on the other hand, doesn’t gain as much from radio to television.
The country was years away from a successful professional soccer league in 1960, not to mention the incarnation of MLS. Now a football fan can watch the matches from here and from across the Atlantic Ocean (the English Premier League and the UEFA Champions League, for example) with ease.
The rise of competition and the use of screens to watch sports came at an inopportune time for baseball.
If they are bored, Americans can change the channel very quickly. On social media platforms like TikTok, things move faster than a bullet train. Baseball is anything but fast as far as Americans are concerned.
Bored of baseball?
When you look at the data for actual games, you understand why people might think the sport is too boring or too slow.
In most sports other than baseball or football, the game is constantly in action. Unlike baseball, there is real rhythm as each football play begins with a moving game and play clock.
Also, there is simply no sport that requires someone to sit for more minutes with so little action, so often. While the length of NFL games is similar, remember that an MLB team has 162 regular season games per year. The NFL has only 17.
Perhaps, people might be more willing to sit through long games if they cared about the players. Many people have pointed to the fact that baseball has no “stars” as one of the reasons the sport has struggled.
In an era where fans increasingly prefer players over teams, this could be a big deal.
One way we can see this is through the number of Instagram followers top baseball, basketball, and soccer athletes have.
The inability to be big on social media is just one reason baseball is probably struggling with today’s youth.
Beyond social media, there was a time when baseball’s biggest stars were household names. Consider a 1945 Gallup poll asking Americans if they knew who the different stars were in various industries.
More than 90% said they knew who former baseball star Babe Ruth was. The vast majority, 90% of all Americans, not only knew who he was, but could give a description of what he was famous for. Note that this survey was conducted 10 years after Ruth last dressed to play professional baseball.
Ruth was better known at the time than World War II General George Patton. The same percentage of Americans knew who Ruth was as future president and five-star general Dwight Eisenhower, who had just helped the Americans to victory in Europe.
Modern polling indicates that no modern baseball player comes close to Ruth’s level of recognition. In fact, some data indicates that less than half of Americans know who Trout is.
The lack of star power is simply not the case in basketball or football. You have stars like James and the recently retired Tom Brady who have a Ruth-level name identification with the American public. Both sports, unsurprisingly, have far more athletes known to at least 50% of the public than baseball.
Is there anything baseball can do to turn the tide? I don’t know.
Perhaps the best question to ask at this point is whether baseball is merely trading in its legacy. As the greatest generation, namely my father’s, fades into the memory books, it seems quite plausible that baseball’s place among the top 2 or 3 favorite sports in America will fade along with it.