I agree that being a fan of MLB and of the NFL or NBA are not mutually exclusive, but I'm not sure that makes the rise in popularity of other sports relative to baseball irrelevant. I have roughly equal interest in following MLB, NFL, and NCAA football, somewhat less in NCAA basketball and professional tennis, and very little in any other sports -- but over 95% of my sports cards are baseball cards.
If I were slightly more interested in the NFL and/or slightly less in MLB, that could perhaps tip my collection to 95% NFL instead, even though I would still be a baseball fan. Baseball has the advantage of having much more pre-war material to collect than the other sports, so the question I would want to ask is how much of our collecting interest is accounted for by interest in history/antiques/lithography and how much is accounted for by interest in baseball itself. If it's mostly the former I would expect the hobby to remain strong for the next several decades; if it's mostly the latter I wouldn't expect there to be a similarly large group of us 50 years from now, even if there are a hundred million people still around at that time who consider themselves baseball (or beisbol or yakyu or...) fans.
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