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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Baseball in general is in long-term decline [1]. And of course football rules supreme. I try not to yuck someone else's yum and I'm not the biggest sports watcher in general but personally I find baseball to be boring. There's too many games. They go on for too long. Not much happens. I think the fandom, such that it is, is from older people with nostalgia from when it was a far bigger deal and when they probably grew up playing it themselves. The latter is increasingly being displaced by soccer

[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/714281/football-top-sport-socce...

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I find this to be completely the opposite of my recent experience. The games are fast and with much better, consistent payoff than other sports such as football and soccer. Progress is far more discrete and there's basically always something happening except during inning or player changes. I agree that there are a lot of games, but that's a feature: you don't have to pay attention to every game. Because of the discrete nature of progress and the number of games you can get meaningful statistics out of a single season. I say this as a relatively young person (<30) who only loosely follows other sports.

> The games are fast and with much better, consistent payoff than other sports such as football and soccer.

Soccer is a slow burn where a game is always standing on a fragile equilibrium. Football and baseball are mainly boring because they are turn-based, with long periods of nothing happening between brief action moments.

Basketball is the only dominant US sports that matches soccer in terms of excitement and teams standing on a fragile equilibrium. Of course the NBA screws this up by stretching finals games into 7-game series, capping soccer-levels of excitement derived from winner-takes-all tournaments. It's no coincidence that NCAA tournaments manages to build up so much attention and such a dedicated following.

I just... don't agree. Every pitch in baseball is exciting and there are almost 300 thrown in an average game, even if most end up with no progress. Meanwhile I find "fragile equilibrium" games to be boring as hell to watch, there's hardly any progress being made! I don't want to watch an abstracted tug of war drawn out over 3 hours.

With football it’s possible to watch every game, which I think better fits today’s model of fandom.

Baseball I get the sense people watched or listened to some, often while doing something else, and followed the rest in the newspaper or the evening news highlights.

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