It’s not very popular with the younger generations (possibly because it is viewed as -extremely- boring). It’s been bleeding fans slowly but steadily foe at least a decade now.
It’s not very popular with the younger generations (possibly because it is viewed as -extremely- boring). It’s been bleeding fans slowly but steadily foe at least a decade now.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s interesting, because it’s no more boring than it was 20 years ago. It is, however, like most sports, tied up in bullshit exclusivity contracts. From my perspective, all of sports has a problem with gambling advertising and with making it annoying to just watch the sport in the first place. If a certain game isn’t exclusive to Apple TV or Amazon, then you still have to deal with your local team’s games getting blacked out for 90 minutes after it aired live if you bought the league’s streaming package for $150 per year.
Maybe baseball isn’t boring, and their business model is teaching people like me to stop watching. I watch fighting games instead now.
PattyP@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
Sports has a problem with advertising full stop. Gen Z is the first generation to really have grown up when ad free streaming was widely available. It has gotten so much harder to stomach the ads as I have gotten less accustomed to tuning them out. As a result I just watch way less live sports than I used to.
ushmel@piefed.world 1 day ago
It's actually less boring now that they use a pitch clock to speed things up. Some people hate it, but I don't usually want to be stuck at a baseball game for 5 hours because the pitchers are having a bro-off. My team also sucks lol.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, I was never bored, but it is a deterrent to keep up with the sport when each game goes 3 hours and there are over 150 of them in a season. Cutting off all that extra time is only a good thing.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s possible there are multiple influences at play here. I’m certainly not disagreeing with you, I’m also of the opinion that baseball is deeply uninteresting to watch. I can understand how someone could be into it (much as with any other hobby), I just personally find it only marginally less dull than a seminar on comparative accounting practices (read: a great deal less dull than cricket).
I think a big part of it is the diversity of entertainment. If your interests don’t align with what baseball offers, it’s no longer a problem to find something else to occupy your time with. You’re not trapped into a paradigm with five or six sports to choose from, each with a limited season, and many of these new ones you can also engage with (gaming, drone racing, CTFs, competitive nerf battles, etc.) which gives you an appreciation for the game that is missing from most professional sports. Basketball and Football both are still quite popular with the younger generations, and both are physically very integrated into american culture. Streetball is about the most accessible sport out there, and every school in the country has a football field (and you can play touch or flag football games in any park)
I suspect it’s the same reason non-american Football (soccer) has maintained such popularity: there is almost no barrier to engagement, even at a non-professional level (you just need a ball and a couple piles of sweatshirts) and more formal infrastructure for it is incredibly common to find. Whereas baseball, tennis, jai alai, golf etc. are all unsafe to play in a public setting where there’s a risk of an unaware bystander getting beaned by a small hard ball going 200mph, and require safety equipment that raises the barrier to entry by quite a bit (nets, mainly). They still have traction, but if you’re a kid in a shitty suburb or poor town, you’re far more likely to be able to play soccer/football/basketball than you are baseball, and will be able to relate more intimately with those games when watching them played.
(And that’s not to mention esports)
When we’ve got so many choices and so little time to ourselves, why spend it on something we have to compromise our way into enjoying?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
One of those ways that people have choices is with multiple competing soccer leagues, is there not? That may explain in and of itself why it does better. Of course, that’s a chicken and egg thing with how much the market can sustain, but there’s no one to keep MLB or the NFL in check. The NFL, I understand, does have a similar generational problem, but that could also be attributed to CTE findings.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Sure, and I imagine that’s a big part of it too. From what I understand all professional sports are having difficulties gaining traction with the Gen Z demographic, but baseball is especially hard-hit (their recent rule changes to try and increase the pace of games may have done something to help with this, I haven’t seen any data about it).