Quote:
Originally Posted by dalakhani
I can buy a lot of your criticisms of George but this one doesn't fly. Baseball's fall from the perch of america's game has much more to do with the advent of sports tv than anything George ever did.
Sports such as baseball or horse racing for that matter simply aren't made for tv. Football and basketball with their pace and natural stoppages are more easily staged and better to keep interest. Tv is the answer there.
There are lots of answers to the decline of baseball but listing George as a primary reason is fallacious.
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Baseball lost much of it's luster after the 2 strikes, both over free agency. The resulting big/small market issues that are now simply a given but this wasn't always so. You denying that competitive balance isn't a factor in the decline of baseball is silly. Your hypothesis makes no sense if we are talking about 1973 when sports were televised widely and no sport became more widely covered with the advent of cable tv then baseball. So in the 70's people suddenly decided that football was fun to watch and baseball wasn't? Professional basketball was virtually out of business in the 70's and made a comeback on the back of Magic johnson/Lassy Bird, not because it was easy to watch on tv.