Culture Crash: The Decline of America’s Favorite Pastime

Sports in America are big business – the NFL is back and is a TV ratings juggernaut. The NBA season is just around the corner and already Twitter users are making memes and ranking players, ready for another season to obsess over. But what has happened to the appeal of MLB in America?

Baseball is famously known as America’s pastime, but it is seemingly at a point where its influence in America is basically nill. The sport currently has some of the best players of all time playing the game – Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtanhi are record-breaking all time greats and they play on the same team. Aaron Judge is a marquee star of a marquee franchise, the New York Yankees, and Albert Pujols returned to his former team and hit his 700th home run this year. You would think these major storylines in a sport called America’s pastime would translate into big ratings but.. Well, that has not been the case.

This year’s MLB All Star Game drew the lowest ever TV ratings for the game. This year’s nationally televised games on Fox are down 15% from last year and even last year’s ratings weren’t stellar. So what is happening? While the NFL and NBA have managed to stay current and cool, with their stars being some of the biggest celebrities of the day – think Tom Brady and LeBron James – MLB has sharply fallen behind the curve.

They’ve tried changing the rules, increasing the pace of play, and more, but at the end of the day, none of it seems to be working. Is the season too long? Is the game simply not exciting enough? No one knows for sure. What we do know is that baseball as an entertainment source in America is faltering, and no one knows how to stop it.

The MLB Playoffs are upon us, but the question is, who will be watching?