There was a time when baseball deserved the title of America’s favorite game.
The Gallup Poll documented its preeminence in 1948, a dozen years after the Hall of Fame’s initial election. Gallup’s interviewers asked a cross-section of Americans to name the sport they preferred to watch. These were the top three responses:
Baseball, 39 percent
Football, 17 percent
Basketball, 10 percent
Gallup released its survey results in April 1948, the same month in which a Sporting News editorial proclaimed baseball to be “the sport of the people, the fun of the common man, the national pastime of America.” The praise may have been a touch excessive, but who could honestly dispute the conclusion? Baseball had scored a veritable rout in the nationwide poll, winning by a margin of better than two to one. Its supremacy seemed secure, its future bright.
Yet there were people in the sport — influential people — who worried about its status. Branch Rickey, the sharpest executive ever to grace a front office, had warned as early as 1943 that professional football was destined to emerge as a serious threat. Arthur Daley, a stolid columnist for the New York Times, chuckled at the very idea. “What challenge,” he asked, “can a 20-game sport ever make to a 154-game one?”
He would eventually find out, an unhappy trend that I discuss in my new book, Cooperstown at the Crossroads: The Checkered History (and Uncertain Future) of Baseball’s Hall of Fame, newly out from Niawanda Books.
Baseball remained the nation’s favorite game throughout the 1950s, yet football steadily narrowed the gap, a trend exacerbated by the contrasting styles of their commissioners. Baseball lagged under the lethargic Ford Frick, while the frenetic Bert Bell propelled the National Football League forward.
“Professional football’s attendance has been going straight up in the same decade that baseball’s attendance has been going straight down,” moaned baseball executive Bill Veeck, “because Bert Bell gave the NFL such aggressive leadership.” Bell kept pushing, exhorting, and scheming until a fatal heart attack struck in October 1959 at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field, where he was watching the Eagles play the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Insiders predicted that Bell’s demise would curb football’s momentum, but Branch Rickey sensed that the younger sport would not be easily shaken. “I am alarmed at the subtle invasion of professional football, which is gaining preeminence over baseball. It’s unthinkable,” he grumbled in 1959.
Rickey’s concerns were echoed by Larry MacPhail, another future Hall of Famer renowned for his innovative spirit. “Baseball is in real trouble,” he said. “I regret to say that it is no longer the national pastime.”
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MacPhail’s gloom was slightly premature. Gallup reported in 1960 that baseball retained a lead of 13 percentage points over football — down from 1948’s margin of 22 points, yet substantial nonetheless. Football’s new commissioner, 33-year-old Pete Rozelle, was pleased by his sport’s steady progress, though he acknowledged its underdog status. The NFL launched its schedule each September, but Rozelle made a point of waiting until the mid-October conclusion of the World Series to pop the cork on a bottle of champagne. “Here’s to the beginning of football season,” he would say.
Rozelle dispensed with this quaint tradition only after firmly establishing himself as Bell’s successor. The cover story of a December 1962 issue of Time declared football to be “The Sport of the ’60s,” and Rozelle did his best to convert the hype to reality. He launched the Super Bowl four years later, signed massive television contracts with the major networks, and gradually transformed Bell’s vision into reality. Gallup detected a new leader by 1972:
Football, 32 percent
Baseball, 24 percent
Basketball, 9 percent
Baseball has continued to lose its hold on the American heart ever since Gallup reported those disconcerting results. The reasons have been well-documented.
Games have steadily grown longer — from an average of two hours and 27 minutes in 1972 to three hours and seven minutes in 2022 — yet the amount of action has declined. There were 16.7 strikeouts in a typical contest during the most recent season, up 50 percent from 11.1 per game in 1972. The rise of analytics has inspired bizarre defensive shifts, quick hooks for starting pitchers, and a nightly glut of relievers, all of which have deadened the product. “Analytics has had a deleterious effect on the way the game is being played on the field,” admitted Rob Manfred, the current commissioner. And, of course, the steroid crisis has shaken the public’s confidence.
My aim here is not to dwell on the factors that have caused baseball to slip, but to stress the severity of its decline.
“Take a look at the empty seats in ballparks and the empty ballfields in playgrounds. It concerns me, and for those in baseball, it should scare you,” warned Mike Schmidt in 1995. The problem has grown considerably worse since then. Big-league attendance declined in nine of the 12 seasons preceding the Covid-19 outbreak, resulting in an overall drop of 13.7 percent. An average of 12 million viewers tuned into World Series telecasts in 2021, a pitiful fraction of the 40 to 50 million who routinely watched in the 1980s and early 1990s. The February 2022 audience for Pete Rozelle’s shining legacy, football’s Super Bowl, was nine times bigger — 112 million.
It came as no surprise, then, that Gallup’s most recent survey on America’s favorite sport, which it conducted in December 2017, found football occupying a position of dominance and baseball suffering a free fall:
Football, 37 percent
Basketball, 11 percent
Baseball, 9 percent
But, you ask, what does this lamentable history have to do with the National Baseball Hall of Fame?
The answer should be obvious. Baseball’s problems are the hall’s problems. The empty seats and fields that troubled Mike Schmidt might, with the passage of time, translate to a plaque gallery devoid of fans, a museum with no reason to exist. Cooperstown has good reason to worry.
Rob Manfred has promised an aggressive response to baseball’s on-field shortcomings. Big changes will be implemented for the 2023 season, including a pitch clock and limitations on defensive shifting. Theo Epstein, the executive who assembled world-championship squads for the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs, collaborated with Manfred in planning this rescue mission. “The goal,” said Epstein, “is to move closer to the very best version of baseball.”
The Hall of Fame is saddled with its own deficiencies, which we’ll discuss in coming weeks, yet it lacks a similar focus on self-improvement. It has no discernible master plan for the decades ahead, no Theo Epstein at the wheel, no stated goal of becoming its “very best version.”
Bill James, the statistical guru and baseball historian, issued his own warning in 1995, coincidentally the same year in which Mike Schmidt sounded his alarm. “If the Hall of Fame’s administrators don’t take seriously their problems,” wrote James, “something else will come along and push them aside, within the course of a few decades.”
That critical moment may soon be at hand. The Hall of Fame was born at the apogee of baseball’s popularity, and it prospered greatly from its link to the unchallenged national pastime. But the sport and the hall have fallen considerably in public esteem. They now face stark options — evolution or irrelevance.
Baseball appears, at long last, to be taking steps to embrace the former option and avoid the latter. The Hall of Fame must do the same. It must reinvigorate itself, inspiring new levels of excitement and engagement among the game’s millions of fans.
The next nine Friday installments of this newsletter will offer a way forward, a nine-part action plan. If you’re impatient and you want to see the whole plan at once — along with a breakdown of every Hall of Fame election from 1936 to 2022 — click here.