Major League Baseball Enjoying New Golden Age

Listen to the critics of the game and they will tell you baseball is a dying sport. They will tell you the age of the average baseball fan gets older every year because younger people don't care about the game anymore.

The critics will tell you kids don't follow baseball any more because the game is too slow and too boring in this age of instant gratification. They need games that have more action, more violence, like basketball or football or soccer (although personally I don't know if there has ever been an activity more boring than soccer. Maybe watching paint dry or grass grow).

It's fashionable to criticize baseball these days, especially given the steroid controversy, and Lord knows the fools who run baseball (that means you, Bud Selig) deserve to be lambasted. Sometimes, it seems they are hell bent on killing the game, but they never can. It's almost as if baseball keeps reinventing itself.

I am reminded of what the great sportscaster Bob Costas once said about baseball. He said metaphysicians should use baseball to prove the existence of God because no man could have created a game as great as baseball.

Now, in the past I felt like I had to defend baseball, especially after the strike in 1994 wiped out the World Series, something that two world wars couldn't do. But I no longer feel I need to defend my favorite sport.

This is not to say the game is perfect, far from it. For one thing, I'd like to see weekend World Series games played in the afternoon and earlier starting times for night games - 7:30 on the East Coast, instead of 8:30 or 8:40. And do away with the dreaded designated hitter.
And more than anything else, get the steroids out of the game.

Still, not only is baseball not dying, but I believe it is enjoying a renaissance the likes of which the game never has seen. The numbers don't lie. For the second straight year, Major League Baseball is on pace to set an attendance record.

We read about how the steroid controversy is turning fans away. If that's true, those fans have a funny way of showing it since they are going to the ballparks in record numbers. Outside of San Francisco, 90 percent of baseball fans probably think Barry Bonds is a creep, and that may be a conservative estimate. They may go to the ballpark just to boo the Giants slugger, but they are still buying tickets.

In New York, old timers wax philosophical about the so-called golden age of baseball in the 1950s, when there were three teams in the city and it seemed the World Series was played every year either in Yankee Stadium, Ebbetts Field or the Polo Grounds.

It's human nature to yearn for those good old days, when everything seemed simpler and more innocent. But I would submit that this is the true golden age of baseball in New York. Never has the game been more popular in the city. There are more column inches devoted to baseball in the New York newspapers than ever before. Turn on WFAN, the city's all-sports radio station, in January with six inches of snow on the ground, and they will be talking about baseball.

The Yankees lead all of Major League Baseball in attendance, averaging about 51,000 per game, a remarkable achievement, considering that not too long ago they had trouble getting half that much. The Mets are not too far behind, drawing about 42,000 per opening.

Combined, more than seven million fans will attend Major League Baseball games at Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium this season. Even in a city as big as New York, that is an astonishing number. During the 1950s, the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants never drew more than six million in any single season. And that's three teams.

While New York would seem to be the center of the baseball universe, the game is flourishing in many other markets as well. Boston (where the fans may be even more maniacal than in New York), Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Detroit and Houston to name a few.

To top it all off, Yankees fans no longer have to hear how their team is bad for baseball because it wins the World Series every year by buying all the best players. Sure, the Yankees have the highest payroll at more than $200 million`and have made the playoffs for 11 straight seasons, but they haven't won a title since 2000, when they beat the Mets in the last Subway Series. In the last five years, five different teams have won the World Series - The Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001, followed by the Anaheim Angels, Florida Marlins, Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox.

Record attendance and newly found parity - yeah, baseball's doing just fine. Don't listen to the naysayers.