William Voegeli, a political scientist and senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, has penned an essay for that publication punningly titled and subtitled “Thrown Out at Home: America moves on from baseball”. Evidently a fan himself, Mr Voegeli captures the mood of many of his fellow followers of the National Pastime, the feeling that baseball is a declining sport, ineluctably fated to follow the paths of boxing and horse racing, once massively popular, now niche entertainments. Do you know the name of the current holder of the world middleweight title? Can you name three champion race horses? A century ago, any half-aware American male could do both. In another century, will the winner of the World Series be a similar trivia topic?
According to the most recent Gallup survey to ask “What is your favorite sport to watch?”, baseball (9%) was far behind football (37%), narrowly behind basketball (11%) and not much ahead of metric football (a/k/a “soccer”) (7%).
Evidence apart from public opinion surveys shows a pastime becoming an afterthought. From 2015 to 2019, attendance at major league baseball (MLB) games declined by 7.1%. Television viewership for the World Series, baseball’s showcase, fell from 44.2 million per game in 1978 to 9.8 million in 2020. Ratings for local broadcasts, thought to be the baseball industry’s last line of defense, are in decline. And neither the sport nor its fans have time on their side. In 2016, the average viewer of nationally televised MLB games was 57 years old, up from 52 in 2000. Just 7% of these viewers were under the age of 18.
The essay probes the many explanations that have been offered for baseball’s evanescence. It omits Major League Baseball’s recent embrace of wokeness – quite justifiably, as the downward trend long antedates the rise of the new anti-humanist cult. Mr. Voegeli’s discussion is careful and thorough, though the hypothesis that he seems to favor, lack of competitive balance, has trouble explaining why baseball was dominant in the popular culture until roughly the 1960’s. He acknowledges that fact:
In fact, the decades of baseball’s greatest popularity coincided with it having the most powerful dynasty in athletic history. In the 44 seasons from 1921, when Babe Ruth transformed the New York Yankees and baseball itself, through 1964, when it became clear that baseball was being eclipsed by professional football, the Yankees played in 29 World Series, winning 20 of them. There were 16 MLB teams for all but the final three seasons of this era, which means that the Yankees overperformed by, roughly, a factor of seven.
During baseball’s golden age there were also franchises as forlorn as the Yankees were dominant. From 1902 to 1953 the St. Louis Browns had only 11 seasons when they won more games than they lost, compared to ten last-place finishes. In 1954 they relocated and finally found success as the Baltimore Orioles. The Senators of Washington – “first in War, first in Peace, last in the American League” – were nearly as inept, and also had to relocate to become competitive, playing since 1961 as the Minnesota Twins.
To suggest, as Mr. Voegeli goes on to imply, that baseball owed its “golden age” simply the absence of a competing summer team sport seems rather lame. There is no inherent reason why football, basketball or even ice hockey can’t be played in warm months. Their expansion into what used to be baseball’s monopoly seasonal slot is the consequence of the latter’s weakening position rather than a cause. Other sports moved in when they saw that baseball did not prevent them from drawing crowds from April through September.
There is also one omission from the essay. It never mentions baseball outside the United States. In 2019, the last year before panicdemic disruptions, Japan’s National Professional Baseball, its counterpart to MLB, set a new league attendance record and drew more fans per game than MLB. The NPB does, however, face a rising challenge from soccer, and its margin of superiority has been shrinking. The story is similar in Korea, baseball’s other Asian bastion, and in the Republic of China. That four countries in which baseball differs significantly both on the field and in the business office seem to be on similar trajectories suggests that factors peculiar to the United States are not fully explanatory.
I have no better theory than anybody else, but I do have an observation.
Sports thrive on competition. Even the essentially solitaire endeavors of bowling and golf and driving fast cars have tournaments and championships. It’s natural for sports fans to carry their habit of “rooting for the home team” over to comparisons between sports, but those comparisons have no real meaning. The fact that hundreds of millions of misguided souls watch soccer matches doesn’t diminish baseball one whit, just as baseball hasn’t diminished cricket or cricket, hurling. De gustibus non disputandum est. There’s room enough in the world for a plethora of sports. If baseball isn’t the sport that 91 percent of Americans most like to watch, we in the other nine percent should not fret but should joyfully shout, “Play ball!”
Further Reading: Daniel A. Métraux, “Baseball in Japan and the US: History, Culture, and Future Prospects”