Quote:
Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud
The main reason why Major League Baseball is no longer a "national" sport is due to the fact that the big market teams don't want to share their local TV revenue, which for some teams, tops more than $200 million dollars per year.
The only way I see this changing is if/when local revenues begin to drop to the point where the only way that all 30 teams can survive is by complete revenue sharing, which would lead to major networks, and even streamers like Amazon and Hulu, to jump in the fray for broadcast rights.
Otherwise, it'll remain regional, with the smaller market teams fighting for every penny while the large market teams sit back count their endless piles of cash.
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Baseball's very nature is regional, IMO. As noted, it's a leisurely game.
Perhaps as a child of the 80s I missed baseball as a truly national sports so I can't wrap my head around the idea that it ever truly was. But for as long as I've been aware of the game, it's had almost exclusively regional appeal.
I think ultimately baseball's time as a 'national' sport diminished as our reach did. Once the population spread further west/south, it became harder and harder for a single team to dominate the landscape. Before it was television, radio towers weren't exactly blasting Yankee games into San Diego. As the population spread, carriers spread with it and that was how the sport grew - through regional voices.
The NFL and NBA didn't really explode into the national consciosness until we already had a media landscape capable of blasting it out far and wide. It went from a niche sport to a national one pretty damn quickly.
Whereas baseball just crept along growing with the populace.