I love baseball, but it requires an attention span and an appreciation for strategy. I’m not sure how many people have that patience anymore. So much of life is now almost instantaneous. ‘Delayed gratification’ is when it takes more than 3 minutes to microwave something.
Baseball was my passion until I graduated from high school.
Unfortunately, I did not have the bat speed or the outfielder arm strength to compete for a baseball scholarship at any of the top college teams.
Once I stopped trying to improve my game, watching baseball games became unbearably boring, and I completely lost interest in Major League Baseball.
I grew up listening to the games on the radio. Loved it. Dad and I would listen while fishing, working on the cars, just putzing around in the garage. Never really cared for TV games.
Now, me and the grandkids do the same. We are building a small sailboat together. But we always listen to the games.
Once per season, for a treat, we will go to a game. Just too expensive to go more often.
So do I. Since I was in HS, a favorite family activity was going to a game, keeping score, following the play carefully. Try that today.
Back when I first moved out here, the Indians were in playoffs against the Red Sox and the Yankees. It was amazingly easy to get tickets at a decent price for every home game. (buy a bleacher season ticket for the next season) The games were impossible to follow. All of the advertisement breaks and all of the gimmicks destroyed any flow to the game. They affected play on the field.
At games today, there's so much done to entice fans that the game is not much more than a backdrop to all of the "fun stuff". Try following a game and keeping score with all of the breaks between innings for all the "fun stuff" and being surrounded by people who don't follow the game much. By trying to appeal to everyone, they're making it uninteresting to people who go to watch an excellent game. Then there's destroying history and traditions for political correctness. No more "offensive" symbols, banishing Kate Smith's singing, changing rules, etc....c'mon. A large part of Baseball is history and tradition and purity of the game. It's all being erased.