The Baseball Niche*

Tonight the World Series of American baseball begins. 

We'll see the Los Angeles Dodgers play the Boston Red Sox. Foreign reader(s) these are two of the game's oldest and most storied franchises. This is the first time they've ever met in the WS.

Throughout the 20th century baseball was described as the National Past Time. And it was. In 1941 the three most popular sports in America were baseball, college football and boxing. All the other sports in America begin in the Autumn becuase back in the day, they didn't want to compete with Baseball. 

But in the late 1950s the NFL began its slow rise to prominence and passed baseball sometime in the 1980's. The NFL has never looked back.

Baseball is a niche sport now, all be it, the game has a big niche. That niche shrinks a little every year. For example, the Atlanta Braves' Sun Trust park holds 41,000. The Braves previous home, Turner Field, held 49,000. Before that Atlanta Fulton County Stadium had a capacity of 52,000.

Baseball likes to tell us that ball parks grow smaller becuase they want a more intimate setting closer to the action. Yeah right. If they could cram 70,000 in there, which the old Yankee Stadium in New York could hold, they would.

The game isn't as popular as it used to be. 

There's a lot of reasons why, we'll go into them all this week.

*Play on words. Anyone else remember The Baseball Bunch?