I’ll start with the MLB piece first since it’s the simplest to explain, although the NBA’s reasoning isn’t all that difficult either.

The decline in the popularity of MLB is the direct result of the strike in 1994. You see the decline begin in ‘93 because it was obvious at that point that the strike was inevitable. The strike ended the ‘94 season early and threatened to carry over into the ‘95 season. That caused the regular Joe to become angry with both the owners and the players blaming both sides for being too money hungry and ruining the fan experience. Four years went by and ticket sales were at all time lows, black-outs were a common thing, and no one really cared. In ‘98 Sosa and McGuire started chasing down home run records and with every steroid filled swing of the bat, more and more fans started paying attention again. Of course, at the time a majority of the fans didn’t realize that ‘roids were what was causing 40 year old records to fall, or if they did, they didn’t care because it was good for the game and if it’s good for the game, it’s good for the fans. That made it good for the teams, which in turn made it even better for the players. This is where you will notice a rise in the popularity of the MLB, which will then be followed by another downfall once all of the steroid use became up front and obvious to all the fans. I’m sure you have heard enough of it from ESPN that I don’t have to recap that.

On the NBA front, the basic reasoning for its slide in popularity was the fact that all of the greats retired around the same time. We lost Magic, Larry, and Jordan, and there were more and more NBA players getting into deeper and darker trouble than the NBA wanted. You had players dying of drug overdoses and getting arrested for more violent crimes than ever before. The league got labeled as the Thug League. But really, with the loss of a lot of the greats, you just had a large lack in talent and without that, scoring was constantly low. Most of the coaches and their offensive philosophies centered on slowing the game and defense instead of running and scoring. As those guys were slowly replaced with younger offensive oriented minds, you started seeing scores creeping back up toward triple digits. Teams got smarter and faster and started running the floor more and that brought the fans back, most importantly the casual fans. The decline you see after that period is the time frame in which the Spurs started and ran their dynasty as well as the Pistons becoming a powerhouse again. Unfortunately, both of these teams based their style off the old school defense first mentality and the championships became boring and there was yet another loss of casual fans. That is why David Stern is quoted as saying, “Thank god we are finally getting a championship back in the big market cities” during this years playoffs.

Hopefully this shed some light on the fall and rise of those two sports’ popularity. Of course, those numbers in that Harris poll should really not be taken as a true indicator of a sports popularity. At least not this recent one from January. They state that only a little over 2,300 people were polled and only over a five day period, online no less. That’s such a small sample size that of course the %’s are going to be jumping all over the place. Seriously, how many of us regularly go to Harris website often enough to even know they are having a poll?

The root problem with baseball IMO is that it’s too slowly paced, and it’s probably never going to get faster (they’ve been trying to speed it up for years).

Fans today prefer more action than baseball can offer. It can be deadly dull for a casual fan, who doesn’t care about the finer points of the game and just wants some entertaining visuals. As attention spans have grown shorter, so has baseball’s popularity. One reason football is so popular is that it offers action on a timed, regular basis- not intermittent, like baseball.

The labor and drug issues have certainly hurt through the years, but the major damage is from plain old boredom. Perhaps they should rewrite the rules to make the game more like Blernsball.

That’s my concise, yet meandering opinion. Go Falcons!