Past its time?

America’s one-time love struggles for relevance in the short-attention-span era

If you’re a fan of the game, you’ve certainly read about Major League Baseball being at a crossroads. But the way I see it, baseball ran the stop sign and is already a mile down the road toward permanent cultural irrelevance.

And without a neck-jerking, tire-squealing U-turn, the sport will cement its status as part of the ever-growing tranche of culturally unimportant regionalized sports leagues, right alongside hockey in America and Major League Soccer.

Yes, the nation’s pastime is certainly living up to its name these days — it’s a sport of past times.

Baseball attendance dropped by more than 3 million people last year, the equivalent of a major retailer closing one of its best-performing stores. Overall, baseball attendance has dropped by 10 million since 2007.

And per the Sports Business Journal, the average age of a Major League Baseball television viewer is 57 years old — up nine years over the past decade — and rising. That’s far and away the oldest fanbase of the major team sports leagues, and with only 7 percent of baseball’s fans under

Dieter Kurtenbach

18, per the study — another “best” — there’s no cavalry coming to save Commissioner Rob Manfred and company from this irrelevance.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for that bleakness — rich teams playing Moneyball, dramatic changes in the television industry, and MLB’s nearly comical inability to market itself to those damn kids — but baseball’s demise really boils down to the product that’s on the field. Baseball can be as engaging and entertaining as any sport, but right now, no matter what the superfans and die-hards tell you, the game is downright boring.

The average MLB playing field is 2.5 acres for the seven defenders behind the pitcher to roam, but increasingly, the pro game is being played on the 60-foot, sixinch span between the pitching rubber and home plate.

Last season, there were more strikeouts than hits for the first time in MLB history, and nearly a third of all plate appearances ended without a ball being put into play.

The 2018 season also saw the fewest defensive chances per game in major league history. There was one fewer play in the field per game in 2018 than there was in 2011. (That might not seem a like a lot, but it took a full generation — 28 years — for the previous drop of one chance per game to happen.)

These isolated pitcher-vs-batter showdowns might make for decent TV viewing for those older folks who tune in for the centerfield camera, but it makes for a dull experience at the ballpark — unless you have really good seats or an excellent pair of binoculars and the tracking ability of a professional cameraman.

That’s if you have the attention span to take the game in at all.

“The Godfather” clocks in at 2 hours and 58 minutes, but the average nine-inning major league game took three hours last year.

That’s right, you can take in arguably the greatest movie that’s ever been made or watch the Angels and Mike Trout (who might be the greatest baseball player ever, but reportedly has a lower Q score than Rockets backup center Kenneth Faried) take on the Seattle Mariners.

Or, you know, do a million other things with that time.

The kicker: The length of MLB games was a marked improvement over 2017!

Then again, there’s no such thing as a shorter eternity.

And don’t blame millennial or Generation Z ADD for this, either. Last year brought us the longest average plate appearances in baseball history, and if you weigh the average amount of hits per game (8.44 per team last season, on par with many dead-ball era years) and the interminable length of the average contest, we only saw a hit every nine minutes.

Say what you will about the NFL, whose games also take an eternity, but at least there’s a hit on every play.

There’s simply no energy, pace or rhythm to a modern baseball game — and every year, more and more of the sports’ athletic relatability is stripped away.

Fewer plays but more players. Last year shattered the records for most hitters and most pitchers used in a single season.

Less action but more random, short-lived characters. Feel free to pitch that terrible idea in Hollywood — maybe Fox will buy it.

Baseball isn’t so much a game now as it is an overly technical chess match featuring no-name “stars” and an ever-rotating cast of Openers, LOOGYs, ROOGYs, platoon guys, and sixth-inning defensive replacements.

The sport has even been stripped of its fun strategy. When was the last time you saw a hitand-run? Hell, when was the last time you remember someone actually running? There were

1,100 fewer base-stealing events last year than there were in 2011. Even defenders are mostly standing around these days.

Home runs are cool, but so is watching someone score from first on a double, or trying to get from first-to-third on a single. There’s a kinetic energy to plays like that — the beautiful dare of risk vs. reward is played out for everyone to see, as opposed to a guy swinging as hard as he can for the umpteenth time in the hopes that he’ll be rewarded with a towering fly ball that may or may not go out.

I’m not suggesting rewriting the principle rules of the game. I merely think it’s time to recalibrate the sport to augment more of the fun parts of the sport and to minimize the rote aspects of it.

Baseball has done such a thing before. For the 1969 season, MLB lowered the mound by five inches, a response to pitcher dominance. Sure enough, offense increased. The sport looked the other way on steroids for more than a decade to help offense, too.

Is there a ready-made solution for the problems that plague baseball today?

I sure hope we find one, because right now, no matter what the kool-aid drinking congregation says, the sport is dying and there’s no obvious cure in sight.