It's directly related to demographics and societal changes.
Young people do not want to invest the amount of time it takes to follow baseball. It's like a part-time job. When there was no internet and only channels 4/5/7 what else was there to do? Slowly, as more options became available, the interest in baseball as a spectator sport has waned.
It's not the Red Sox. If anything, they were the last baseball team to continue to capture a town.
The audience is aging out.
I agree. Baseball was 'the national pastime' when we had lots of time to pass. I'm thinking not just before there was the Internet (actually, the web since the actual Internet was a 70s creation) but also no cable TV.
In my case even when we got cable TV in central CT there was no WSBK 38 so no Red Sox on the basic cable plan. You could get it if you paid extra, but there was no way my parents would do that. I knew of no kid whose family had WSBK on cable. It was seen as an extravagance. I knew one adult who did, but he had to explain to people how he justified it.
If you were a school kid back then, what did you do with your summer vacation? Baseball filled in a lot of time. 162 games meant even if your team was off, there was something going on. It also meant if you missed one game it probably didn't matter, you could catch up and not miss much. I watched a lot of NFL football because there wasn't much competition for the one TV on Sunday afternoon, but football was this thing that happened once a week and was over. It didn't have the staying power that baseball did.
Homes were lucky to have one TV, but often more than one radio. Kids didn't have cell phones, but if they were lucky they had a transistor radio, so they could listen to baseball. Given the way the AM broadcast band works, you could pick up games from far away. I remember listening to games on KMOX from St Louis, they had a signal that reached into NE on summer nights. Also all the East Coast cities usually could be heard. NY, Philadelpha, Baltimore, etc.
You didn't get instant highlights. What you got was the daily newspaper. Box scores, standings, statistics. You sat there and read. Eventually I used newspaper route money to afford Baseball Digest, a weekly magazine. It came in the mail. It gave me something to look forward to. I read it cover to cover.
We had one luncheonette in town that had a news stand with things such as Baseball Digest and, gasp, newspapers from Boston. It was as if they came from Mars. I only rarely would get one if ever. Baseball Digest was a better value for money.
I think the USA in general was a poorer place back then than it is now, at least in the places I lived. IMO relative poverty was why baseball stayed popular longer in Latin America. People were still at the point where newspapers and radios were a big part of how they got their information. Soccer was a fall/winter game, baseball a spring/summer game.
