{"id":82908,"date":"2022-07-22T11:03:51","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T16:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=82908"},"modified":"2022-07-22T11:03:51","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T16:03:51","slug":"play-ball-but-dont-watch-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=82908","title":{"rendered":"Play ball! (but don’t watch it)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The MLB All-Star game this past Tuesday garnered a rating<\/a> of 4.2 rating and 7.5 million viewers. Both numbers were record lows, though the game did handily win the night.

Last year MLB pulled the All-Star game out of Atlanta because the state of Georgia dared to exercise democratic oversight of its own election process. Certainly that drove some fans away, and I’m one of them. I’ve paid for MLB.TV for quite a few years, but this year I didn’t, and I won’t ever again, and I won’t watch another All-Star game, until MLB apologizes for its craven kowtowing to wokery.

But, baseball’s problems started long before that. An important catalyst in knocking baseball off its unique place in American culture was the 1994 strike. That strike began in August and wiped out the rest of the season and, most importantly, the postseason.

Before that strike, the ratings of the All-Star game from 1992-1994 were 14.9, 15.6 and 15.7. The year after the strike, in 1995, the rating was 13.9, and it has been steadily dropping ever since. Whether by design or not, the steroid era which followed the strike did bring back interest in baseball, as behemoths bashed home runs at a record pace. In 1998, Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa battled to break one of baseball’s sacred records, the home run record of 61 set by Roger Maris in 1961. The rating of the All-Star game that year was 13.3, and that has never been exceeded since.

Since 2015, the rating of every All-Star game has been a new record low, except for 2019. The ratings of the World Series, too, have fallen in tandem.

There are a witches brew of reasons as to why baseball’s popularity isn’t what it once was. Younger people have a myriad of other entertainment options, and many more choices of sports to participate in when they’re younger. Pace of play doesn’t help baseball’s cause, nor does a decline in balls put into play.

While I never miss a Vikings game, and my favorite sports teams of all time were Larry Bird’s Celtics teams, baseball is my favorite. Each season is a saga. From the languid sun-drenched days of spring training, to cold spring games, through the height of summer, to the crisp fall postseason, the ebb and flow of teams in the standings is a story one can follow for months.

And if an increasingly woke corporate MLB drives away fans like me which it can’t afford to lose, what hope does it have?

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The MLB All-Star game this past Tuesday garnered a rating of 4.2 rating and 7.5 million viewers. Both numbers were record lows, though the game did handily win the night. Last year MLB pulled the All-Star game out of Atlanta because the state of Georgia dared to exercise democratic oversight of its own election process. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273926,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/273926"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82908"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82911,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82908\/revisions\/82911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}