Since I was young, baseball has been my favorite sport to watch. No matter who was playing or the time of day, if baseball was on, I would be watching. Over the past few years, I have started to tune out of baseball. I have found that baseball lacks the entertainment and excitement that other sports have. I am not the only person who believes that baseball is a dying sport; baseball is losing fans yearly.

Baseball games have started to become too long for our generation. In a world full of swiping, social media and texting there’s not a lot of attention span left for a three and a half hour baseball game. The Major League Baseball organization implemented the pitch clock after realizing games were running long. The pitch clock has led to increased fan interest. The average audience for the 2024 MLB playoffs was 3.95 million people, an increase of 5% from the year prior, according to Forbes. Before the increase, baseball was falling off for years. In 1992, 21.98 million, whereas in 2022, the viewership was down to 7.51 million people, according to the University of Michigan.

The pitch clock was added to games going into the 2023 season. A clock that gives pitchers 15 seconds to begin their motion with bases empty, and 20 seconds to begin their motion with runners on base. This clock speeds up the game, which makes baseball easier to watch. Allowing the game to be more entertaining. In 2022, without the pitch clock, the average length of a game would be 3 hours and 4 minutes. Now, a couple of years later, the average length of a game has dropped to 2 hours and 36 minutes, according to the MLB, helping out our generation’s short attention span to tune in.

The game needed a change for the younger generation, and to stop the long pauses in between pitches and plays to increase engagement. As a baseball player myself, it’s easier to stay dialed in while playing in between pitches than it is to watch. As a player, you are focused on what you need to do to win the game. As a fan, you want action, and you want it quick, but in baseball, there is only so much action in so little time. Baseball is seen as a dying game, and a dying game cannot continue as it is without making some changes, or else the game will stay the same and eventually just die. That’s sad, even for someone excited to watch another season of White Sox baseball, like me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if more changes are enforced to the game to make it more entertaining for fans, so there is a change for viewers, to make them more entertained. A couple of changes that I think should be enforced are a shorter season and a salary cap. A shorter season would keep fans more invested and players healthier. The current MLB season is a hundred sixty-two games, the longest sports season of all. Games are played almost every day from late March to the end of Sept., and possibly the end of October if a team reaches the playoffs. I feel that if the season were cut in half and games were played 3-4 days out of the week, fans would be more invested.

A salary cap would be helpful because there are teams right now, like the Dodgers, who can buy any talented star player, and can collect those types of players all offseason, with no repercussions. After all, there is no limit on a salary cap. As for other sports, there is, and that makes the game more competitive, and can keep fans invested, with no team buying their way into a championship, but instead having to build a championship team from developing players, making roster additions, and trades when needed.

Baseball is known as a game that drags on and seems to never end, based on how long games are. There needs to be more changes added to the MLB format in order for the league to gain popularity and to become more successful. Sure, baseball is America’s pastime, but it seems that right now, baseball is America’s most boring sport.