Long but good article.
What's The Matter With Baseball?
Nobody goes to baseball games anymore. That’s the common alarmist wisdom that has become one of the overarching themes of the 2019 season, which had barely gotten underway before USA Today was declaring that MLB’s attendance slide of recent years had taken on a “more permanent look.” By May, the Associated Press was running litanies of empty seats from coast to coast. And by July, the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan was compelled to run a column with the headline “I remember the good old days of baseball, but I’m worried about its future,” which managed to cite Ryan’s grade-school obsession with the infield-fly rule, Tony Conigliaro, and today’s “bang-bang, video-game world” in service of handwringing that America’s pastime is past its prime.
Indeed, MLB attendance is set to decline for the fourth straight year, down more than 9 percent from the league’s 2015 peak. It’s a trend facing the NFL as well, but baseball always seems particularly prone to panicky takes when the turnstiles stop spinning, and this go-round is no exception: We’ve so far seen the attendance dip blamed on high ticket prices, fickle millennials, rainy weather, games that are too long or too boring or too high-scoring or too low-scoring, and Barack Obama. (Okay, not Obama. Yet.)
So which of the culprits is to blame, if not all of them? And is there even a body, or could the reports of baseball’s death be greatly exaggerated? Let’s interrogate the suspects one at a time:
Baseball-hating millennials
Since 1937, Gallup has been polling U.S. sports fans on their favorite sports to watch, and the ensuing decades have not been kind to baseball. The sport has fallen from being the top choice of 39% of Americans to a mere 9% in the latest poll, behind basketball and only two percentage points ahead of soccer.
That sounds dire, especially since, as Dave Zirin noted recently in The Nation, baseball also has the oldest fan base of any sport, prompting visions of the young socialist hordes all flocking to MLS games (or at least to tuning in to the Premier League on their phones) while baseball dies a lonely death.
A deeper dig into the Gallup numbers, though, doesn’t actually show that baseball is as unpopular as all that. The percentage of respondents saying they were at least “somewhat” baseball fans actually rose slightly between 2001 and 2019 (from 56% to 57%), so it’s likely that Americans are just adding more sports to their menus, not dropping one for another.
Besides, watching baseball, like playing golf, has always been relatively dominated by the olds, with new generations of geezers packing ballparks as previous cohorts die off. As Kennesaw State University economist and author J.C. Bradbury tells Deadspin, “People have always complained about it. It’s fun to go back and look at stories from the ‘30s saying ‘baseball is an old man’s game.’”
Boring games that last forever
This is MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s favorite theory, and possibly the only issue on the planet that he and Zirin agree on. It’s also the reason behind Manfred’s onslaught of rules changes, from pitch clocks and intentional-walks-by-hand-signal to limiting mound visits and pitching changes, all aimed at speeding up games. (Though the rabbit ball introduced this year — and yes, it’s the ball and nothing but the ball — is bound to work against these efforts by increasing scoring, since time of game is integrally linked to how fast hitters make outs.)
Game length is undeniably on the rise: The average nine-inning MLB game reached three hours and two minutes in 2014, and after a slight dip to 2:56 the following year has remained above the three-hour mark ever since. With games increasingly stretching deep into the night, the theory goes, fans are increasingly choosing to instead curl up on the couch, where they can doze off in peace in the later innings.
Except it’s not clear that fans are turned off by longer games. The last time MLB nine-inning game time peaked — at 2:57 in 2000, at the height of the steroids era — league attendance was on a six-year rise. And when games got shorter in ensuing years, attendance went down, not up, only recovering once game times re-swelled after 2003.
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Why Does MLB Have An Attendance Problem?
The prices to park the author mentions at a couple of the ballparks is mind boggling.. WTF? That's just TO PARK!!
