The Importance Of Baseball In American Culture

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The sport of baseball was once unrivaled as the top sport in American culture and entertainment. However, since that time when baseball stood alone in sports with notable stars spanning over multiple decades such as Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Hank Aaron, it has rapidly declined and no longer retains its position as America's pastime. The MLB has steadily lost viewers year after year and shows little sign of regaining its former popularity. This drop in viewership comes as a result of an overall slower pace of game and a wavering interest of the sport among younger people. Baseball's depleting number of viewers, diminishing pace of the game, and its aging demographic are all key contributors as to why baseball has officially lost its cool. …show more content…

The pace of MLB games has been drastically decreasing over the years and is not keeping up with other leagues such as the NBA and the NFL which feature constant action and an overall faster game which is keeping viewers tuned in to the game. The average time of an MLB game has risen over the past couple of decades with games being played on average in a time of 3 hours and 2 minutes in 2014 in comparison to 2 hours and 44 minutes in 1986.(Gasper) While an increase of about 15 minutes may not seem like a lot, it introduces more breaks for commercials and less actual baseball being played which alters the pace of the game dramatically and makes the game feel like it is being reduced to a crawl. The MLB realizes this and has made attempts to increase the pace of the game by putting a “30-second time limit on mound visits by pitching coaches and managers” and “the time between innings was truncated by 20 seconds.”(Gasper) However these attempts to speed up the game have not had much affect as the average game time remains to hover around 3 hours. The game is consistently slowing down and it has tremendously influenced why the MLB is losing viewers and as a result is in an overall

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