Is the popularity problem with baseball is that there just hasn't been enough kids playing some variant of the game growing up? Not saying all the over the top traveling team / Little League stuff is good, but I think there was something to be said about you and the kids in your neighborhood fucking around playing stickball that made you appreciate the game..
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It's just so damn hard to organize a 'pickup game' as a kid.

My buddies and I all at least kinda enjoyed baseball but we rarely got our gloves/bats out and tried to set up any kind of game. Basketball, football and roller hockey were all just easier.

Realistically it took 6-7 guys and a patch of unoccupied dirt (that didn't exist in the neighborhood) to play baseball. To play football took 5 (and we would occasionally just dick around w/ 3 and have a full-time QB). Basketball 2. And that could be done in a yard or hoop. Hockey was a little tougher because we needed to make sure there weren't any cars in the parking lot at the pool, but we could typically find some time to get it done.

And frankly, finding someone that can pitch worth a damn was always difficult. I played some level of organized ball for about a decade and so I was usually pitching and I was still wild as hell.

We'd attempt it every now and then but invariably we ended up playing football and if we had a big group we'd head down to the pool for hockey.
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Baseball is still extremely popular. The trouble is it localized. Everbody follows and watches their team.
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Caveat: everybody follows and watches their MLB team if they are good.

Baseball as a sport needs people caring at the lower levels to sustain overall interest just like football (and even then, the atomization of the average American has killed off youth football support from people who aren't directly involved).

FFS in this thread people were thinking Salvy getting time at 1B was some sort of big thing because they stopped watching the Royals in 2016.
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Baseball is a casual sport with a leisurely pace. So it creates casual fans.

But it’s still a very popular sport. But most fans are really only passionate about “their” team.

Very little national interest. Unlike other sports.
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There's also 162 games.

That cuts both ways. For television providers its an INSANE amount of content. I mean that's essentially 6 months worth of programming for 3 hours in prime-time along with pre and post-game shows. And the production costs are fairly low.

It's a hell of a nice block to be able to throw into your lineup, set and forget half your year.

On the flip side...it's 162 games so you'll just never get the day over day passion because everyone's gonna lose 54 and everyone's gonna win 54. In that regard, 2/3 of the season just doesn't matter much in any given year because it's all but set in stone. Any individual loss over the summer means very little, just as any individual win means very little. So the passion just doesn't come out.

And the pace makes it perfect for that sort of thing. It's background music to your summer. It's there and that's about the extent of it.
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The main reason why Major League Baseball is no longer a "national" sport is due to the fact that the big market teams don't want to share their local TV revenue, which for some teams, tops more than $200 million dollars per year.

The only way I see this changing is if/when local revenues begin to drop to the point where the only way that all 30 teams can survive is by complete revenue sharing, which would lead to major networks, and even streamers like Amazon and Hulu, to jump in the fray for broadcast rights.

Otherwise, it'll remain regional, with the smaller market teams fighting for every penny while the large market teams sit back count their endless piles of cash.
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If I was starting a sports talk radio station, baseball would be first thing I would acquire in my rights. 162 days of programming would be gold.
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Baseball's very nature is regional, IMO. As noted, it's a leisurely game.

Perhaps as a child of the 80s I missed baseball as a truly national sports so I can't wrap my head around the idea that it ever truly was. But for as long as I've been aware of the game, it's had almost exclusively regional appeal.

I think ultimately baseball's time as a 'national' sport diminished as our reach did. Once the population spread further west/south, it became harder and harder for a single team to dominate the landscape. Before it was television, radio towers weren't exactly blasting Yankee games into San Diego. As the population spread, carriers spread with it and that was how the sport grew - through regional voices.

The NFL and NBA didn't really explode into the national consciosness until we already had a media landscape capable of blasting it out far and wide. It went from a niche sport to a national one pretty damn quickly.

Whereas baseball just crept along growing with the populace.
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Yep. this has a lot to do with it too.
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Well, I'm a little older than you and clearly remember watching games on ABC and NBC during the 70's, along with all of the Royals local broadcasts.

As great as Al Michaels is with football, I think he's even better with MLB. I used to love watching him call games on ABC back in the day.

Also, Amazon is trying to jump into the fray to broadcast MLB games but again, there will never be true revenue sharing until either the big market teams give in or they so outnumbers the smaller market teams in terms of revenue to the point where the league just can't continue.

The dumb part is that if MLB overhauled their revenue sharing plan to include every team, their TV deals would skyrocket because networks like TBS, TNT, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, along with the previously mentioned streamers, would join in on the bidding.
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Re: Griffey and Trout, Junior also did it all based on his natural ability. He never really changed or improved his approach at the plate.

Trout has already evolved his plate approach 2x, including a major change that eliminated a flaw of his (fastballs up were his kryptonite in 2014. By 2015, they no longer were).

It’s just a guess, but I’m going to bet Trout evolves as his physical tools start to degrade in his 30s and finds a way to remain a superstar. Griffey’s last really great season was at age 30, his first in Cincinnati. He had one more good season at age 35 but even that wasn’t “superstar” level.

I’d bet the house Trout has more than one “star” level season over the rest of his career.
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Yeah- even with the Royals being good in the 70s and 80s, it was still rare that the Royals were on the "game of the week".

This is why watching "The Baseball Bunch" and "this week in baseball" (mel allen I believe?) were required.

This week in baseball was the only place to catch royals highlights (other than local news, which typically gave sports maybe 2-3 minutes max).
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Eh, you're preaching to the converted on the last point.

The MLBPA is so dogmatically opposed to a salary cap that MLB owners will never agree to any kind of strict revenue split. And without that, there's no reason for ownership to agree to any kind of hotchpot approach.

The MLBPA needs to agree to a cap, MLB needs to agree to a floor, the owners need to divvy up the pot and every single one of them can get rich together.

But whatever - they didn't make me commissioner so this is a Manfred problem.
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Yup - never seen anything like that.

One year he had a hole in the top of his swing and led the league in Ks. Next year it was just...gone.

Dafuq? Who does that at the big league level? "Eh, I just don't think I want to strike out anymore and I want to walk as often as I K from now on. So I'm just gonna do that...."

That doesn't happen. Strike zone judgment stabilizes damn near overnight for most big leaguers. You see very little meaningful evolution for the overwhelming majority of them, let alone dudes who have won MVPs before 22 years old.

It was just crazy. That was around the same time Harper eviscerated creation and then followed it up with a really advanced approach at the plate. I was sure we were going to see a modern day Mantle vs. Mays. And then Harper just evolved in the wrong direction to the point that he just swings with hilarious violence now and misses pitches he should not be missing. He didn't miss those at 22 or 23 years old - but then he decided trying to hit 500 ft moonshots was too much fun so that's what he does.

Harper turned a strength into a weakness while Trout turned a weakness into a strength. And that's what demonstrates what makes Trout so unbelievable and why the Harper v. Trout conversation hasn't been had in 4 years.
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