Baseball Football Basketball and Other Popular Sports - Baseball

Participation in baseball, the sport once known as "the national pastime," fell during the final years of the twentieth century. During a sixteen-year period ending in 2003, baseball participation dropped 27.1%, according to the SGMA. (See Table 1.6 in Chapter 1). In that year the number of Americans who played fell to 10.9 million, with the sport ranked as the sixth most popular team sport in the United States (see Table 5.3) and the seventh most popular team sport for youth ages six to seventeen. (See Table 1.10 in Chapter 1.)

While enthusiasm for playing baseball may have waned, the number of Americans who said they "follow" the sport had not changed significantly since the 1930s when Gallup pollsters asked Americans whether they were fans of professional baseball. During the late 1930s, about 40% of Americans followed big league baseball. In the early 1950s, an average of 43% were fans, and a poll conducted in March 2004 reported that 45% of Americans followed baseball. (See Figure 5.2.)

When the Gallup Organization asked self-described baseball fans how closely they followed the sport, however, almost twice as many said they were less interested than they had been three years earlier (30%), than said they followed baseball more (16%). The rest (54%) said

FIGURE 5.2

their interest had stayed the same. Among sports fans in general, the number who followed baseball less was almost triple the number who followed it more, though more than half said their interest had not changed. The reasons for this drop in interest may include controversy over the use of steroids by star players and the variable quality of play caused by drastic differences in salary expenditures between teams. In 2003 this ranged from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays' $19.6 million to the New York Yankees' $149.2 million.