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Notes -
I think baseball has issues well beyond the things the rules are trying to fix.
1). It’s really prohibitively expensive to attend games in person. Taking a family of four to a ballgame, buying each person a snack and a beverage is easily $100. Which means first of all, most parents, unless they’re well-off or their child is super into the game, don’t take the kids. This means that you’re cutting off the next generation of potential fans who will likely never see a player in person.
2). Most games are no longer on basic streaming plans. I’m a fan of my cards, but in my area, you need to have the tier above basic on my cable provider or get a separate service (Fubo) if you want to see the game live. This makes accidental discovery of a game on TV harder, as you need to go out of your way to watch it. Again, this cuts down on children discovering they like the game.
3). Like most sports, there are simply too many teams and too many games, such that the majority of games and teams are irrelevant to the season. You can be under 0.500 at the all-star break and still get a wildcard slot. The season goes from mid February to mid October, nearly 200 games. And the large number of teams makes it impossible to keep up with the players on any teams other than your own or close rivals. There’s just no feeling that the game you’re watching matters or that you’re watching star player at their best. There’s not even a sense of rivalry as the players are unknown, and they switch teams often enough that they really care that the Cubs and Cards have been rivals for generations.
4). Youth sports isn’t a universal experience— by the time a kid hits 8-9 most sports are select teams. If you aren’t good enough to make the team, you don’t play. And these teams often require lots of parental commitment as they practice a couple times a week and travel for tournaments. This leads to a lot of kids growing up not really familiar with the game. It’s a lot harder to appreciate hitting the cutoff man when you stopped playing the sport after t-ball.
That's prohibitively expensive? I wish two people could get out of a hockey game for that, and I live in one of the less expensive cities in the NHL.
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