A few problems:

1. baseball competes in a sea of media and multimedia options and its competition has been growing ever since TV moved into the cable-era. Now it also has to compete with internet, games, social media, etc. Theres only so much time and attention for people to focus on it.

2. Long season. I love baseball but you can go 2-3 weeks not watching a game and have missed nothing.

3. Cost to go to games plus location of stadiums in car-centric areas often means painful commutes to the games for most Americans and then bringing two kids is like making it a $400 affair between parking, food, souvenirs etc. That's expensive for a lot of people.

The exit of people from the cities into the burbs in the mid-20th did a lot of damage to the idea of going to a game.

All true.

Meanwhile, we saw the Savannah Bananas tonight. I wonder if their brand of baseball will find appeal more broadly? It’s more spectacle than sport but it’s the most enthusiastic I’ve seen a crowd for anything other than football.

Bananaball is interesting but its more similar to the Harlem Globetrotters than anything in the MLB pipeline.

Which is fine, its fun, its ridiculous, but its not baseball.

I mean, theatre always has its place

Agreed, this is pretty huge. I think at one point in my early teen years (I think 2008? My recollection was that it was a year the Phillies were in it, although that could have been 2009) there was a game in the World Series that got postponed and had to be restarted the next night, and because it already was a few innings in, the remainder the next night started maybe at 8 and ended at 10, which was much nicer given that I always struggled with the early morning starts for school.

The other major thing I think affected it is that in most of the markets where baseball is most popular, ticket prices skyrocketed over the past few decades, and a lot of the more popular teams would sell out for almost every game pretty early on in the year. Growing up in the Boston area, it was pretty noticeable how much more of a hassle it became for my dad to take my brothers and I to Red Sox games in the early 2000s[1]. In my earliest years, I remember my father taking us each to one game individually each season as well as usually a couple with all of us there, but it got to the point where eventually he'd just buy all of us tickets for one game because getting tickets to 5-6 separate games just wasn't worth the money. He and I started going to a lot of minor league games in my high school years just because we enjoyed getting to see baseball in person enough, but my brothers generally weren't as interested in taking an hour or two to ride to New Hampshire to see the Fishercats or something similar. I have to imagine that this phenomenon made it a lot harder to get kids interested in baseball for my generation.

[1] Yes, this also happened to coincide with the years that the Red Sox started doing really well, but that wasn't necessarily the cause. Their streak of sell-outs that lasted close to a decade iirc started earlier than the 2004 season, and the prices were not nearly as high (even after adjusting for inflation) in previous times they had made it to the World Series. My dad had told stories about going to see large numbers of games despite being a mostly in debt grad student in the mid eighties, including the year they won the penant in 1986. Baseball just wasn't as expensive to see in person until relatively recently.

The speed of games in those days was influenced by very little reliance on relievers (it's why Cy Young is the leader in wins AND losses, though even in recent history, Nolan Ryan had more complete games in some years that many pitchers today have in their ENTIRE careers). The need for breaks between innings, switching pitchers, etc to fit with TV commercial breaks is also an influence.

> - was in the afternoon

There's more night games than day games, but day games aren't unusual (at least they aren't unusual for west coast teams)

Older boomers attended school in the days when there existed

  - daytime World Series games
  - pocket-sized transistor radios
  - a corps of teachers who had not grown up around hand-held electronic devices

I forget whether it was 1966 or 1967 that a classmate followed the game without getting caught.