Posted on 07/23/2022 11:11:04 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Blame it on lingering effects of the pandemic, resentment over the lockout or economic fears.
Major League Baseball is struggling to fill the stands at pre-COVID levels as the sport heads into the last 2½ months of its first season since 2019 without capacity restrictions.
MLB reached the All-Star break with an average attendance of 26,409. That represents a drop of 5.4% from the All-Star break of 2019 — which was 10 days earlier than this year.
League officials remain encouraged and point to the recovery. […]
… Victor Matheson, a Holy Cross economics professor who specializes in sports economics […] said MLB relies more than other professional sports leagues on out-of-town fans. That makes MLB particularly vulnerable to issues that could curtail tourism. …
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
I have always liked hearing the ball game in the background on a fuzzy radio. Childhood memories but it’s impossible to follow now. Announcers are more cheerleaders than color commentators. All the new stats have me lost.
But the whole ball game has changed and teams playing from different leagues, wild cards...there’s a LOT wrong and they’re just not making it exciting. They should have left the game alone.
It was fine the way it was.
I truly believe MLB, the commissioner, and owners are destroying the sport on purpose. They know the constant barrage of communism will eventually kill it dead.
There’s something bigger in play here.
We’re headed back to filling up stadiums to watch gladiator fights to the death and executions. Not sarcasm either...
They don’t want Les Misérables watching anyway.
College baseball is a much more entertaining product.
I hate that as well as: interleague play, wild card, three batter rule, the shift, and their desire to go woke.
It has become an ugly, unentertaining sport.
we paid $$ for my husbands and his dads name on some bricks in a park at Progressive Field.
I am wondering if they are going to take a jackhammer to the bricks that reference the Indians.
Ours did- it said “ Go Tribe”
I’ll take that $$$ back, lol!
I didn’t quit watching because of any pandemic; I quit watching because they allowed the players to insult veterans and other patriotic Americans.
Who can afford gas to drive to the park and back, even if one wanted to go? Baseball lost me as a fan of one of the greatest games during the last player strike.
Then, even stupider, they instituted that Designated Hitter abomination. Now, big fat pigs such as David Ortiz can ‘earn’ millions of Dollars and never bring a glove to the park. Hall of Fame for him. I used to love to watch Mo Vaughan. Yeah, I used to watch the Red Sox, quit MLB IN 1994, forever.) He was klutzy but dang that guy was so freaking graceful. He played First, mostly. Ortiz played Bench. Screw him.
MLB has so screwed their own product that it is almost laughable. They are fortunate that they have the TV contracts, but that will end. They ain't selling a lot of anything on the East Coast with their commercials at one o'clock in the morning.
Major league baseball needs to do away with pitchers having to bat, require players to grow scruffy looking beards and hair half way down to their waist and adopt full length trousers instead of knickers and stirrups.
That will bring the crowds back.
They need to play by the rules the way Abner Doubleday wrote them.
Designated hitters, T ball extra innings rules. Batters stepping out of the batters box after every pitch.
Yuck. Unwatchable.
Overestimate wokeness? No, but the media completely ignore it.
You say “this forum” as if you regard yourself as being an outsider to it.
I’m done with Corporate Sports.
$6 COLD hotdogs and $10 WARM beer doesn’t help.
There, that’s more precise.
Oh yeah and the constant barrage of equity and of course stupid rule changes where baseball carries 15 pitchers.
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The day is coming when teams will have an offense squad and a defense squad.
Detroit Tigers suck a$$.
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