Is Baseball Really a Dying Sport?
Via Sports Illustrated.
Baseball has always been known as “America’s Pastime.” For more than a century, the game has brought the country and its people together through many tough times in history. But recently, baseball has started to lose its popularity and appeal, especially among younger generations. In the eyes of many, baseball seems to be dying in America–and that prompts us to raise doubts about the continuity of the nation’s beloved pastime.
An important thing to look at when determining the success of a sport is its attendance records. Since 2012, the average attendance numbers per regular season game have decreased steadily year by year, going from 30,806 all the way down to 28,203 in 2019. Last year, the first “normal” season since COVID with fans allowed back in stadiums, the average dropped even further to 26,566.
This trend can come as unsettling to baseball fans. But on the bright side, there seems to be a massive turnaround this year. As of August 5, attendance records for 2023 have shot back up to 28,995 people per game, up 9 percent from last season. This is likely in part due to the introduction of a pitch clock which, simply put, was implemented in an attempt to quicken the pace of play by limiting the amount of time pitchers have to throw pitches and how often they are able to disengage from an at-bat (pickoff attempts, step offs, etc.). Indeed, the implementation has been extremely successful. The average time of a game this season is currently 2 hours and 40 minutes–a significant decrease from last year, where games lasted 3 hours and 6 minutes on average. To more casual fans of baseball who do not want to spend an extra half hour watching players stall and waste time, this likely comes across as a pleasant development. Maximized action and gameplay during games may be a huge reason why MLB stadiums are seeing more fans again.
Furthermore, MLB had its best financial year of all time just last year, earning over $10.8 billion in revenue. Would the leading organization of a dying sport really be setting record numbers for income? With generational athletes such as Shohei Ohtani, a once-in-a-lifetime two-way player who leads the league in home runs as the ace starting pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, and Aaron Judge, captain of the prestigious New York Yankees who did the impossible and broke the American League single-season home run record set in 1961 by Roger Maris, taking the field every night, I would think otherwise.
Earlier this year in January, Ipsos, a global market research company, surveyed 1,035 American adults and asked whether they were fans of 13 different sports. They could choose to be fans of however many sports they liked. Football led all sports, expectedly, with 44 percent of respondents saying they were fans of the NFL. In second place came baseball, with 31 percent.
Sure, baseball may not be as popular as it was in the 20th century. In today’s USA, football may have overtaken baseball to become the most dominant sport. But to the delight of baseball fans, myself included, America’s game is far from dead, nor is it showing any impending signs of drastic decline in the coming years.