Baseball Overshadowed: An opinion on the decline of the MLB and why there is a lack of media coverage during the playoffs

As a lifelong Royals fan, I’ve had a pessimistic view of baseball’s decline since 2015. Yet even for fans of a winning team, our national pastime has become the most boring of our major sports in today’s world.

I remember my dad taking me to my first game when I was 4. We drove there two hours before the game to get a Melky Cabrera bobblehead, a forgettable player who wouldn’t even be on the team by that time next year. After, my dad and I walked through the Royals’ Hall of Fame till the game started, with decades of history only people like my dad still care about.

Today, we don’t have to get to the stadium two hours early. The Kauffman is practically empty, even on a Saturday night. All of the cheers and intensity I remembered from my childhood are now overshadowed by the echoes of the Tomahawk chop next door.

This isn’t just showing the decline of a losing team, it is a trend occurring across the league as people care less and less about the sport.

Baseball used to be the biggest sport in America in a time before the NFL or NBA even existed, capitalizing on radio coverage and lack of visual media in the 20th century. But today it’s barely an afterthought in the athletic world. It’s hardly even a topic of conversation anymore on sports networks or media. Even today, with the playoffs happening as we speak, all anyone cares about is Sunday Night football.

The MLB has tried to make baseball more interesting this year with new rule changes attempting to speed up games and increase scoring, but the reality is that fast or high-scoring games are not what make sports appealing. It’s the icons fans look up to, it’s the intensity as players face off in an open-field tackle or crossover with an opponent you get to see in other games.

In an era where social media and sports networks are basically a highlight reel of fast-paced games, baseball takes a back seat. Fans, accustomed to the electrifying moments of touchdowns and slam dunks due to their short attention spans, don’t seem to even care about sitting in the stadium watching the slow-paced game.

It’s not just my feed, but the entirety of sports media that is ignoring baseball. It may not be the most popular sport, with viewership declining 15 percent across the league over the past nine years according to Forbes, but it deserves coverage on these platforms, especially in October. I mean, the World Series starts in two weeks and no one seems to know or care.

This is the moment 30 teams fight to reach through a grueling 162-game season. These are the teams that cared about winning every game so they could make it here. As a fan, I even turn on the playoffs even when the Royals are missing because these teams deserve recognition. These games are the most intense, high stakes games of the year with the best teams going head-to-head and people still don’t even turn on the tv.

Even the playoff series this month — the most critical games of the season for most teams — have been taken off primetime for most networks, with most games being played at 2 or 5 p.m, some of the biggest dead zones on broadcast networks. The viewership of these games has now dropped nearly 30 percent since last year and every wild card series saw a decline in viewership game to game as well, according to Statistica.

This issue isn’t just affecting viewership, but also ticket sales. The Marlin’s single home wild-card game boasted the lowest MLB attendance for a playoff contest since 1999 according to ESPN, painting a grim picture for the sport’s future, highlighting the slow decline or popularity when fans don’t even fill up the stadium in the teams first playoff appearance in almost 20 years. The fans just don’t care about their home team anymore.

I don’t understand why people care more about what’s happening on their phones than a live game. I’ve seen what today’s short attention span does to us, making us more inclined to watch highlights on their phone than sit down for a two hour baseball game. People should care about their local teams, even when they aren’t winning.

While the sport still endures as a business that will continue to operate as long as it is making a profit, but how long it will survive still remains an unanswered question. However, based on the current interest of fans, it will remain “America’s Pastime,” a fitting name for the last thing people think of in American sports.