This is a huge problem for baseball. Baseball used to be the most popular sport in America. Now it's third. I don't think soccer will ever actually catch it,

This is a huge problem for baseball. Baseball used to be the most popular sport in America. Now it's third. I don't think soccer will ever actually catch it, but that's mostly because MLS is run by the same sort of stubborn people as MLB. Nobody ever really remembers teams with great pitching. They don't really give them names. There's no "Murderer's Row" of pitching in MLB history. There's a reason for that. A home run is something everyone instantly understands. New to the game, old to the game, whatever, it gets people excited. So does hitting and base running. People want to see people hit the ball and score runs in baseball. A walk-off homerun to end a big game is remembered forever by everyone who watched it. Pitching, by contrast, is usually only fully appreciated in retrospect. You don't throw a no-hitter until the last out is counted. Same for a perfect game. A perfect game in the second inning is just a second inning. A home run in the second inning is something that gets everyone out of their seats. The final strikeout of a big game is remembered by fans of the winning team. but it's a footnote for everyone else. So for entertainment's sake, if you're going to either have great pitching or great hitting, you damned well should be focused as an executive to make sure that the hitting is as good as it can get, because the people who care the most about your sport at this point are boomers, stat nerds, and bookies. My 86 year old grandmother who passed 3 years ago? She LOVED to watch baseball with my grandfather. Likewise, my other grandfather would watch whenever he could except for when a John Wayne movie was on. My parents couldn't care less, and in my social group of about 40 boys, only two watched the sport on a regular basis.