Baseball has been around for centuries with the sport itself being a standpoint throughout the 1920s and 1950s. The sport has influenced thousands of people as major league teams, like the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, built a community around their team. The question presented is “If baseball is getting boring to their fans and audiences?”
On March 27, Major League Baseball presented viewers with the return of baseball showcasing all 30 teams playing to their finest. Some fans were excited to see their favorite teams play whilst others say it’s starting to lose popularity.
Sophomore Rocky Morotti was asked if baseball was starting to become a bore to fans. Morotti stated, “It’s fun to see how the game progresses and changes as you move on to different levels. The same goes for watching the sport. It’s so exciting to see what the pros can do day in and day out and it never fails to amaze me.”
Before the beginning of the 2023 season, a new rule was added to increase the speed of the game as well as other rules that change a few outlooks on the game.
When asked on the topic, junior Luca Damiano says, ”I think the MLB is getting more entertaining, they’ve added more rules, more significant bases which allow more players to steal bases and they added the pitch clock to make the games go quicker so people wouldn’t get as bored.”
When the pitch clock was first introduced, many saw it as a nuisance, but before the rule was added, the average duration of an MLB game lasted three hours and 6 minutes back in 2022. Once the pitch clock was added during the 2023 season, the game time dropped down to two hours and 39 minutes.
Besides rules changing over the years, the popularity of the sport has grown national with many players coming from all around the world. Even though there are many different players with all different types of nationalities one has stuck out from the rest; former Los Angeles Angels and current Dodgers player Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani has shown great progress after his first season with the Dodgers taking them to another World Series Championship. His dominance as a two-way player in both hitting and pitching shows his excellent mannerisms dominating in both roles. He even got his own character in the popular game Fortnite.
Besides Ohtani becoming the first ever player to hit the record of hitting 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in one season, he has brought his attention from baseball to Japan as many people in Japan view him as a national hero and a sports idol. Although it doesn’t specifically mention viewer ratings before the Dodgers signed Ohtani to a 10-year deal with a $700 million dollar contract, during the 2024 World Series the average Japanese viewership during the World Series averaged 12.9 million viewers in Japan. Game Two saw major growth drawing up to 15.9 million viewers to the game.
Based on the information given, baseball doesn’t look like it’s starting to become a bore. If viewership increases throughout this new season with exciting jaw dropping moments and players shining throughout the league, baseball will grow more throughout the world and never become a bore.
