Major league ownership has really failed the sport imo. You have the easiest sport to put a kid in. It takes talent yea, but any kid can go hit off a tee and get involved. Football on the other hand gives kids one good hit and that scrawny kid whose hearts not in it is never coming back. Every kid should grow up playing a little baseball and be a fan to an extent. Baseball kids get to play 2-3 games a week. Football kids practice 3-4 times and play 8-12 games a year.
My son loves playing baseball he’s a 10 year old playing up in 12u. He wants to play fall ball and quit football then try out for a traveling team. But he runs home from practice and games and turns on YouTube to watch NFL programming. For the same reason he hates playing football barely any games played, he loves the NFL because every game matters. You can’t get him to watch anything about baseball let alone a game on tv (like there’s any of those available without a subscription).
Baseballs getting overtaken by soccer at least where I’m at. And it’s baseballs fault. [Reply]
I think on a national scale 94 is the right answer.
For me baseball was biggest for me when I was a kid because the Royals were really good and had won a World Series. In fact that's when I started following sports. Marty ball is what started pulling me closer to football. [Reply]
Baseball has been a regional sport my entire life (I’m 47) but perception changes much slower relative to reality. Once upon a time there were baseball towns but even in StL football has been king for a long time. Football has been king for probably about as long as pro football has been more popular than college and its rise can be linked IMO to increased tv coverage and Americans access to it - baseball as stated ITT was made for radio. The survey linked at the beg of this thread by someone shows 1972 as a line of demarcation which makes sense when you consider the growth of televisions in US households throughout the 1960s. [Reply]
Originally Posted by BigRedChief:
l think the McGuire/Sosa home run race saved baseball. It became a national story way beyond baseball fans. The fans came back the next year in their normal sizes/
Then the steroids scandals hit and football went to another level and "America's Game" was now football.
I agree with this.
MLB “felt” very important in the late 90’s. Those Yankees teams were a big fucking deal.
But the Steroid Era and everything that followed really took the shine off the league.
It was sorta the equivalent of the Tour de France and Lance Armstrong. Normal people actually watched cycling back then. Then the scandal hit, and it never “felt” the same. [Reply]
For myself, Ripken breaking the record saved baseball in my heart. At least until pretty recently. Until that moment, you could’ve razed every ballpark to the ground and I wouldn’t have cared. [Reply]
Originally Posted by WhawhaWhat: The MLB owners are monumentally stupid. The exclusive cable deals where 50% or more the fans couldn't watch games any more, the steroids that they allowed to prop up attendance and then pretended to be against later and the payrolls that are so far apart that half the league barely competes.
They've done everything they can over the past 30+ years to suffocate the fan support.
That was it for me. I was an avid Royals fan, now I haven't seen a game of theirs in over 3 years and don't care. [Reply]
Nothing better than the radio and a patio on a summer evening. I grew up on Buddy Blattner/Denny Matthews and then Fred White and Denny Matthews on radio. Al Wisk and Denny Trease on TV when it was long before these MLB cable **** ups.
Then they hired Bob Davis and he was just kinda okay but also kinda terrible.
Still the #1 game in my heart. I lived and breathed it as a kid. Watched all those episodes of This Week In Baseball with the show's theme music on my phone during the season. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Dunerdr:
Major league ownership has really failed the sport imo. You have the easiest sport to put a kid in. It takes talent yea, but any kid can go hit off a tee and get involved. Football on the other hand gives kids one good hit and that scrawny kid whose hearts not in it is never coming back. Every kid should grow up playing a little baseball and be a fan to an extent. Baseball kids get to play 2-3 games a week. Football kids practice 3-4 times and play 8-12 games a year.
My son loves playing baseball he’s a 10 year old playing up in 12u. He wants to play fall ball and quit football then try out for a traveling team. But he runs home from practice and games and turns on YouTube to watch NFL programming. For the same reason he hates playing football barely any games played, he loves the NFL because every game matters. You can’t get him to watch anything about baseball let alone a game on tv (like there’s any of those available without a subscription).
Baseballs getting overtaken by soccer at least where I’m at. And it’s baseballs fault.
Soccer is easier.
Run after ball, try to kick it that way.
I played soccer and first base softball as a little kid. Little kids can't throw accurately to first base.
I played soccer as a kid, but that never created a desire on my part to watch soccer. Soccer just isn't that interesting as a spectator sport.
I never played football, but yeah, I always found it interesting to watch. [Reply]
Probably 1960’s or early 1970’s. Wikipedia says the biggest World Series TV rating was 1978 and 1980, both of them around 42-44 million American viewers. By comparison, the Super Bowl made it above 75 million American viewers during this time period. [Reply]
Way more parity in baseball than the NFL especially when it comes to championships. But facts don't matter to CP. 8 different champions in the last 9 years. In NFL, Brady and Mahomes have 6 of the 9 Super Bowl wins. In the NBA, LeBron and Curry have 6 of the 9 NBA Finals wins.
Royals have the same number of World Series wins in the last 40 years as the Dodgers, Cardinals, and Braves. Yankees haven't been to the World Series since 2009. [Reply]