Quote:
Originally Posted by trdcrdkid
Sorry, but the evidence doesn't support your claim. Below are the attendance figures for the NL and AL each year from 1970 through 2017, from Baseball-reference.com. Total MLB attendance this year was 67% more than in 1979, and per-game attendance was 44% more. Per-game attendance this year was more than twice as much as in 1970. By any objective measure, baseball is a lot more popular now than it was in the 1970s, which was itself a decade of tremendous growth for the sport. It has been that growth, especially the exponential growth of TV money flooding into the owners' coffers over the past 40 years, that has been the primary driver of the huge increases in players' salaries. Marvin Miller and Donald Fehr merely helped the players get a larger share of that flood of cash than they would have otherwise received.
 |
What about TV ratings? Attendance is a very small part of popularity, many more people watch games by TV. If MLB is so popular, then why are the World Series ratings so poor? 2012 7.6 12.6 million, 2013 8.9 15 million, 2014 8.2 13.9 million, 2015 8.6 14.5 million. Even with a historic WS in 2016 12.9 22.8 million. In 1978, the World Series had a 32.8 rating and 44.2 million views. Do you really think a few thousand more people going to games is more reflective of baseball's popularity than losing roughly 30 million fans watching the most important games of the year? The general population doesn't care about baseball like it used to.
Let's compare that to the NFL. The highest rated Super Bowl in the 70s was 1978 47.2, 79 million. Last year 45.3 111 million viewers. If this year's game only draws 30 million viewers, would you say that the NFL is still growing in popularity? Those raw attendance numbers tell us very little. I would like to see how many fans are attending games vs. corporate sales for business just using the game as a write off. The average fan cannot afford to go to many games. I would like for you to tell me why those average fans don't care to watch the game anymore.