It's suicidal by MLB from a long term marketing point of view. Where is the next generation of fans to come from? Kids who don't watch won't play. It's hard to build a fanbase from a population who has never played.
Your problem (games start too late) is due to baseball pandering the game itself away.
Baseball is a game meant to be played in the daytime. All true naseball fans love day baseball. Day baseball has TOTALLY disappeared drom the world series due to ratimgs pandering. Now all games must start at 7:00 or 8:00 pm eastern time in order to fit the socalled RATINGS SLOT.
But the bean counters lawyers and socalled tv programming experts have traded away one great asset (young audience) for a potential ratings in the prime time audiencce.
Will they ever learn? The wild card playoff is a winner. But fixed advanced schedules delay the series and extend an already too long season. All of the above are tvrating panders. d;^)
Not only that, but they also run ads for Viagra during the games. I don't want to watch a game with my kid knowing those ads are coming.
Yep. That's the main reason I don't watch it past the first few innings. What I've seen so far has been great, though.