Parts of them were. If memory serves - and it has been wrong many times before - the climatic 6th game in the 1980 Finals between Julius Erving’s 76ers and Magic Johnson/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Lakers was broadcast live on a Sunday afternoon and was not on tape-delay.
The game is famous because Abdul-Jabbar sat out with injuries/migranes and Johnson played all 5 positions for the championship-winning Lakers, jumping at center to start the game.
I stand - actually I sit - corrected. According to wikipedia game 6 was indeed on tape delay. Sorry for my erroneous comment.
There is a lot of truth in this. I’m over 40 and I love baseball. Then again, I played it for half of my life, and grew up loving the game, so I will go to my grave watching baseball.
However, if there is an X-games show on, and it is against a mid-season baseball game, even I will watch the x-games. That is some exciting stuff to watch, and the events appeal to me much more than a regular baseball game. But much like hockey, it is a rare playoff baseball game that isn’t worth watching, as the balance of the game can hang on just about every pitch. Your mind tends to wander much less when your favorite team is in the playoffs, or you are just an overall baseball fan.
The two sports i will never understand their popularity are Autoracing (specifically NASCAR, but all of it), and NBA basketball. College basketball I love, but the NBA? Run down the court, maybe one pass, shoot! Score or rebound, run down court, shoot!, add, rinse, repeat for 48 minutes. Who could possibly get into this? The 24 sec. Shot clock has turned it into a street game with better sneakers, no strategy, just run and gun.
Personally, I don’t know how you can be a Yankees fan with a family. I have gone to a number of Yankee games, and with the exception of one game, all have been corporate seats. The price of 4 good seats, plus food and if you must, parking, (and a souvenir or two for the kids) and you are out a serious chunk of change.
News flash: tickets to a game in any major sport are very expensive, even before you add in taxes, handling fees, shipping, Ticketmaster extortion charges, parking, “refreshments”, team gear and whatnot. Baseball’s game attendance costs aren’t significantly worse (or better) than those for other sports in my experience. And while the game has dull moments, at least it’s not soccer. 
Cleveland Indians update: the team drew a crowd of 34,282 to last night’s game (won by the Indians on a three-run homer in the bottom of the tenth), the second highest attendance of the season. Warmer weather and a team at the top of the division explains some of the attendance boost (post-game fireworks and dollar-a-dog night probably didn’t hurt either).
I love going to live baseball games. However, it’s expensive as hell.
In addition, a lot of the cities with MLB clubs have a minor league club and the games are a helluva lot cheaper. They’re more fun, too. You sit closer to the field and the players will talk to you between innings.
From The Summer Game, some quotes from a piece Roger Angell wrote in August 1969:
[QUOTE=Roger Angell]
I first heard about the death of baseball one night last December. A friend of mine, a syndicated sports columnist, called me after eleven o’clock and broke the news. “Hey,” he said, “have you seen the crowds at the Jets’ games lately? Unbelievable! It’s exactly like the old days at Ebbets Field. Pro football is the thing from now on. Baseball is finished in this country. Dead.” He sounded so sure of himself that I almost looked for the obituary in the Times the next morning. (“Pastime, National, 99; after a lingering illness. Remains on view at Cooperstown, N.Y.”) Though somewhat exaggerated, my friend’s prediction proved to be a highly popular one. In the next three or four months, the negative prognosis was confirmed by resident diagnosticians representing most of the daily press, the magazines, and the networks, and even by some foreign specialists from clinics like the New Republic and the Wall Street Journal. All visited the bedside and came away shaking their heads. Baseball was sinking. Even if the old gent made it through until April and the warmer weather, his expectations were minimal - lonely wheelchair afternoons on the back porch, gruel and antibiotics, and the sad little overexcitement of his hundredth birthday party in July.
<snip>
Baseball, the argument goes, has a bad image. The game is too slow and too private, and offers too little action for a society increasingly attached to violence, suddenness, and mass movement.
<snip>
A recent Harris poll…which was taken last winter, indicated that football appeals most to high-income groups and to those between thirty-five and forty-nine years old, while baseball still comes in first with old people, low-income groups, and Negroes. Bad, bad image.
[/QUOTE]
Are you in the Bronx? I can’t see how you can spend $200 on a baseball game, even if you treat your kid to a hot dog, soda, and cotton candy.
Even if the tickets are $40 (that gets me lower level box seats at the edge of the infield dirt), the afore-mentioned kids meal runs less than $15, while if I indulge with two beers ($16 total) and a hot dog ($5) that makes it $116 total. Add in $5 for parking three blocks away and it’s $121.
Of course, I eat before I go and buy a bag of peanuts for $2.50 outside the stadium.
You have to be really extravagant to spend $200 for two at a ballgame.
The cheapest ticket to tomorrow’s Yankee game for seats as you just described (lower level, near the infield) are $180 each. That’s from the Yankees website, there are none to be had on StubHub. Upper deck tickets in the infield are $40.
That’s why I asked if she was in the Bronx.
Great excerpt. Thanks. The more things change…
As a cricket fan, that’s pretty much the way I see baseball. Or even T20 cricket.
For certain. I live in suburban Chicago; my wife is a White Sox fan. Let’s say that we decide to go to tomorrow night’s game* against the Red Sox. Keep in mind that, as noted earlier, the Sox are not doing well for attendance this year, so one might think that one could get a last-minute bargain.
The cheapest lower-deck seats (on the Sox web site, which is through Ticketmaster) are ~$25 each, and that’s next to the foul pole. Lower-deck seats closer to the infield are $50 - $75 each. Outfield seats are ~$35 each.
If I’m willing to go very cheap, I can get seats in the upper deck, pretty much directly above the foul pole for $9. Upper-deck seats behind home plate are ~$30.
So, a pair of halfway-decent tickets are going to be at least $60, and more like $100 or so. (Yes, one could probably do a bit better on StubHub. 
)
Hell, my Packers season tickets are around $90 a seat per game, and that’s (a) a much more limited number of games per year, and (b) a much better team.
With the Red Line – the L line which runs past U.S. Cellular Field, and which is the most convenient way to attend a Sox game – now closed for construction for the next five months, I’d suspect that the Sox will have an atrocious attendance record for the rest of the season
How is this possible for the average fan? Are all seats in Yankee Stadium corporate seats now?
I can’t imagine being a kid in the Bronx, loving Baseball, and wanting to see my favorite team in person, but told that an evening of baseball would set my family back $160 for 4 seats in the upper deck? That’s crazy talk. Can the average Joe afford a Yankees game?
When I was a kid (here comes the old man story), the first game I went to I got in with 6 bread wrappers. So did my brother. So for twelve bread wrappers we got two nose bleed seats in the outfield. My dad is the only one who paid, and I don’t think he spent more than $5, although I honestly can’t remember. It may have actually been less than $5.
That was 40 years ago in Pittsburgh. Even though the prices have gone up significantly, you can still see a game very reasonably by today’s money standards.
You go to a less popular game. You can get tickets for Indians at Yankees in NYC for $11 apiece on 6/3: https://www.stubhub.com/new-york-yankees-tickets/yankees-vs-indians-6-3-2013-4168618/
In retrospect, the rumors of the death of baseball in the late 60s were obviously greatly exaggerated and do reflect a lot of conditions that were present at the time. For one thing, such conclusions came after the 1968 season which was “The Year of the Pitcher”. This was great if you loved pitchers’ duels but painful if you loved hitting and couldn’t stand watching one 2-to-1 or 1-to-0 game after another. I think most fans fell into the latter category. Also, as indicated by the Jets reference, the argument showed a definite New York bias. Both the Dodgers and Giants had long gone west, the New York Yankees were mired in mediocrity after having been the dominant team in the American League for decades, and the bumbling New York Mets were still one season away from their miracle year (which revived interest in baseball among a lot of former fans in New York). Finally, MLB had yet to begin televising their post-season games in prime time. I’m aware a lot baseball fans (mainly on the East Coast) hated this move because it led to too many World Series games dragging on after midnight but it did, for a few decades, generate higher ratings and greater overall fan interest in the sport than if the games remained stuck in the daylight hours when most people were working or at school.
Still, while the assessment of baseball’s seemingly dire condition in 1969 comes across as exaggerated and premature (as Angell stated), there are a few kernals of truth in it. The assessment that baseball is “too slow” and “offers too little action” for most people today is even more applicable considering that baseball is not only competing for attention with the NFL and the NBA but also video games and action movies. The conclusion that baseball is hurt by the fact that its audience mainly consists of “old people, low-income groups, and Negroes” is certainly racially-biased in the context of 2013 (and was likely back then) but, if anything, the situation is worse today. Interest among African-Americans in baseball has dropped sharply over the last 20 years and is reflected in the fact that the percentage of African-Americans in MLB is now only 8.5%. As for “lower income groups”, higher ticket prices and the costs of cable TV have chased away many of them. That leaves “old people” and (as mentioned earlier in this thread) Latinos–a fast-growing demographic. Most Latinos come from countries were baseball is still quite popular so it’s not surprising they would continue following the sport after moving to the U.S. However, the question of whether their children and grand-children will also follow baseball or ignore it is still up in the air.
Just saying this over and over does not prove it to be true, nor does it explain the continuing puzzler that MLB attendance isn’t going down and NBA attendance isn’t going up. You keep holding up basketball as something eating into MLB popularity but there is absolutely no reason to believe this to be true.
If baseball is in such serious decline why do so many people pay so much money to go see it? Why is the sport more awash in money than ever?
I keep hearing reports that MLB is more profitable than it’s ever been.
They certainly admit to being more profitable than ever (who knows, really) but certainly the sport is at a zenith in revenues and franchise values are going up.
I have a great deal of difficulty imagining a business that makes $8 billion a year - and that is a low end estimate, IMHO - can’t find a way to keep things going for awhile.
There are indeed, as baseball has declined in popularity, over the last 50 years, relative to other sports, to the point where a regular-season NFL game can crush the World Series in TV ratings.
What Angell could not have foreseen in 1969 is that the sports pie as a whole would grow so insanely fast, over the coming decades, that relative decline would still be fantastic, phenomenal growth relative to almost anything else.
How have sports grown since 1960? Television is too obvious to require elaboration. But also, teams have tapped into a way more affluent fan base willing to pay way more money for a way more upscale stadium experience, businesses have discovered sky boxes as an insanely expensive form of client entertainment, licensing has grown like a weed (when I was a kid, no adult would have been caught dead in a sports jersey with a player’s name on the back), and revitalized American cities have decided to spare no expense in stadium subsidization.
I don’t know what the next 50 years will hold. We may be at a point where sports growth is tapped out, and relative decline will become absolute decline. But, I have thought this before, and been well and truly wrong.
As I said earlier, when evaluating a sport’s health, attendance is only one part of the picture. Case in point: as late as 1980, if you were going only by attendance, the most popular sport in the US was horse racing. While it was true there were a lot more racing tracks and public interest in the “Sport of Kings” 33 years ago, I don’t think any American sports fan even then would’ve rated it above the NFL, MLB, the NBA, college football, or college basketball after considering the whole picture (i.e., attendance, TV ratings, fan discussion, general interest, etc.). Now, MLB has greater attendance than the NFL or the NBA but in other categories that are at least just as important to the overall health of the sport like TV ratings, it’s getting crushed.