Baseball’s Big Comeback – The Dispatch

The Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision on Tuesday that a Colorado state law banning “conversion therapy,” defined by state lawmakers as practices intended to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, violated the First Amendment, reversing a lower court ruling. The law took effect in 2019 but was soon challenged by Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor in the state. A federal appeals court ruled in 2024 that the law did not regulate speech per se, but rather conduct that included speech. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said that the statute violated the First Amendment free speech rights of Chiles and other treatment providers. Among First Amendment principles, “the spoken word is perhaps the quintessential form of protected speech,” he wrote. To learn more about the Supreme Court’s decision in Chiles v. Salazar, read Amy Howe’s coverage at SCOTUSblog.

A joint investigation from five European news outlets published on Tuesday revealed leaked audio of what appears to be Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó agreeing to act on Russia’s behalf to remove the sister of a prominent Russian billionaire from the European Union’s sanctions list. In the alleged August 2024 recording, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reminds Szijjártó of a prior commitment to secure the delisting, and the Hungarian minister confirms he planned to follow through. Szijjártó responded that the report “proved that I say the same publicly as I do on the phone,” while alleging that “foreign intelligence services” had wiretapped him with the help of Hungarian journalists. The revelation drew sharp reactions across Europe: Czech President Petr Pavel called on his government to reexamine its contacts with Hungarian officials, while Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk tweeted that while “Hungary is and will be in the European Union,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Szijjártó “left Europe long ago.”

An American journalist was kidnapped on Tuesday in Baghdad. News outlets reported that the journalist abducted was Shelly Kittleson, a 49-year-old freelancer and contributor for the Al-Monitor news agency. Iraqi officials said security officials chased after the abductors after she was taken and managed to detain one of the suspects, who they identified as having ties to the Iranian-backed, Iraqi-based Kataib Hezbollah group (separate from the Lebanese-based Hezbollah). The officials also said they seized the car Kittleson was first forced into, before she was transferred to a second car after the initial vehicle crashed in pursuit with law enforcement. In a tweet on Tuesday confirming the kidnapping, State Department Assistant Secretary for Global Public Affairs Dylan Johnson noted that the agency had “previously fulfilled our duty to warn this individual of threats against them,” while adding that State Department officials will continue working with FBI agents to secure her immediate release.

Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in conjunction with the Social Security Administration (SSA), to compile a list of all eligible voters in each state and requires the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to deliver mail-in and absentee ballots only to individuals appearing on that list. The order also directs the attorney general to prosecute election officials who distribute ballots to ineligible voters and withhold federal funds from noncompliant states. The order also directs DHS and SSA to identify, for all 50 states, each legal resident who is a U.S. citizen and 18 years old or older and and calls for a USPS review of the design of ballot envelopes and for all ballots to be given a unique Intelligent Mail barcode.

In 1969, media theorist Marshall McLuhan declared “Baseball is doomed. It is a dying sport.” Baseball, he said, is “just too individual a sport for our new age.” In 1955, the Fort Scott Tribune in Kansas predicted that “within 25 years there’ll be no organized baseball except the major leagues, if even they’re in existence then.” And John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants through 1932, publicly worried that the end of the “dead ball” era and rise in home runs would destroy baseball’s appeal.

For a professional sports league that dates back to 1876—by far the oldest in the U.S.—Major League Baseball has always been remarkably eager to predict its own demise.

“This has been a theme, pretty much forever—baseball and its place in today’s fast-paced life,” Tyler Kepner, the senior MLB writer for The Athletic, told TMD. “Everybody always worries that this sport, that’s measured by innings, not by time, where there’s downtime in the action … people have always wondered whether that sensibility is sustainable.”

Throughout the 2010s, the doom prediction seemed to finally be coming true. A sport once called the perfect product for radio was struggling to hold attention in the age of social media. Games lasted longer than three hours, strikeouts and walks were on the rise (to the detriment of action on the bases), and there were few household names—TV ratings and attendance continually declined. In 2019, just 23 million viewers tuned in to Game 7 of the World Series—the lowest audience for a deciding game ever. Newspapers ran headlines about the dire straits of America’s former pastime.

But now, baseball is back. Attendance is up, with three straight years of growth for the first time since the mid-2000s, TV ratings are up, and more young fans are getting into the sport. But what changed? And how long can the resurgence last?

The turnaround started in 2023, when MLB implemented a series of new rules: a pitch clock to speed up at-bats, bigger bases to encourage basestealing, and restricting defensive shifts—a tactic where teams repositioned fielders to turn would-be hits into easy outs. The pitch clock was the most significant change—and the most controversial, given that baseball was the only major sport without some type of running clock. Under the new rule, pitchers had 15 seconds after each pitch to deliver the next one with the bases empty, or 18 with runners on—and it immediately shortened games.

“It restored the natural rhythms and pacing of the game, and it hasn’t lost anything that anybody misses … which was just somewhat self-indulgent, standing around, or stepping off or conferring,” with teammates, Kepner said. Average game times fell to less than 2 hours, 40 minutes after the 2023 changes.

The effect went beyond the clock itself. Before the rule changes, the conversation around baseball was dominated by what was broken—marathon games, defensive shifts that turned hits into outs, a product that felt stagnant. “The conversation was, like, ‘Have we fixed this?’ Rather than, like, ‘That was a great game,’” Joey Duffield, the creator of the popular YouTube channel “Baseball Doesn’t Exist,” told TMD.

The number of marathon-length games has also dropped dramatically. In 2021, 391 regular-season games lasted more than 3 hours, 30 minutes. By 2024, that number had dropped to seven. And legalized sports betting has been a modest boost, Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College and a baseball, told TMD. Baseball offers more opportunities for in-game wagers than almost any other sport, drawing casual fans who once tuned out. But it’s also risky. Duffield noted that if just “one guy goes in the World Series and really just gets caught throwing a game in a big moment,” the fallout could rival the steroid era.

Television ratings for MLB—whose teams play a combined 2,430 games a season (compared to 1,230 for basketball and 1,312 for hockey)—are difficult to compare directly to other professional sports leagues. But the numbers are on an upward trend. Last fall’s World Series—a seven-game classic between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays widely regarded as one of the best ever—averaged 16.1 million viewers per game, a nearly 10-year high, including more younger viewers. And those fans aren’t just watching from the U.S. Dodgers star and Japan native Shohei Ohtani plays at an All-Star level both on the mound and at the plate, and led the Dodgers to a thrilling World Series win over the Blue Jays last season. “He’s done things that nobody else has ever done,” Zimbalist said, “other than Babe Ruth, perhaps.”

But the Great Bambino never had a large country rooting almost exclusively for him. The 2025 World Series—featuring Ohtani and fellow Japanese star Yoshinobu Yamamoto—had modest U.S. TV ratings by historical standards, but it broke records for international viewership. Canada, home of the Blue Jays, averaged 8.1 million viewers per game. But Japan brought in an average of 9.7 million viewers, with the Game 6 broadcast breaking Japanese single-broadcast records. That reflected more than five years of growth for MLB in Japan—viewership has grown every year since 2021, including by more than 20 percent in 2025. Japanese brands have followed the eyeballs: the Dodgers alone counted 20 Japanese corporate sponsors in 2025, eager to reach American audiences through Ohtani’s star power.

This has also transferred to attendance, with many Japanese fans flying to the U.S. to watch games. But even so, attendance is still below its 2007 peak, when the total season attendance stood at almost 80 million people, and average game attendance was more than 32,000. Last season’s total attendance stood at 79 million, with average game attendance at 29,000.

The way fans actually watch games has grown more complicated. As regional sports networks have struggled financially, teams have increasingly turned to streaming, and following a single team’s 162-game season can now require juggling multiple streaming subscriptions and platforms. Even so, local-market blackouts often prevent fans from watching their own team’s games without a linear cable subscription. “It’s dizzying and exhausting to fans,” who aren’t trying to lock into every single game, said Zimbalist.

But becoming a relatively niche product may not be the worst thing, Victor Matheson, an economist at the College of the Holy Cross who studies pro sports, told TMD. In the 1930s, America’s top three spectator sports were baseball, horse racing, and boxing. By the 1970s, more Americans went to horse race tracks than to baseball games. Now both horse racing and boxing have all but disappeared from the mainstream. “The question is not whether you’re going to be the NFL,” Matheson said, “but whether you’re going to go the way of boxing and horse racing.” On that score, at least, the outlook is positive. “When you’re a country of 340 million people, with a GDP of $30 trillion, you can be a kind of niche and still be wildly successful,” he argued. “For as much as we talk about Brazil being a soccer powerhouse, the vast majority of people in Brazil don’t care about soccer.” Even if baseball never regains its status as “America’s Pastime,” it can still enjoy a very prominent place in American life.

But all of this momentum now faces its biggest test: a looming labor dispute. The league’s collective bargaining agreement between team owners and players expires on December 1, and most observers expect a lockout. The last major work stoppage—the 1994 player strike—canceled the World Series and delayed the start of the 1995 season. Frustrated fans who left the sport behind took years to come back.

The core issue is that MLB is alone among the four major American sports leagues in not imposing a salary cap. That combined with its lack of a salary floor leaves baseball with the widest disparities in club payrolls among major U.S. pro sports.

The Dodgers, winners of two straight World Series and three of the last six, are set to spend about $413 million on their 2026 roster, closely followed by the New York Mets’ $375 million expenditure. Meanwhile, the Miami Marlins will pay around $81 million for their players this year, and the Cleveland Guardians roughly $89 million.

Owners of the small teams are not happy with the status quo. This offseason, when the Dodgers signed star right fielder Kyle Tucker to a deal that will pay him $60 million a year, many owners were reportedly “raging” about how dramatically they were being outspent. Even if large market teams like Los Angeles and the New York Mets object, the remaining owners have the votes to override them.

That internal split among owners is what makes baseball’s labor dynamics uniquely difficult. Unlike the NFL or NBA, where unified ownership bargains against a players’ union, baseball faces what Matheson called a “three-front war”—players against owners, but also big-market owners against small-market ones. “These three-front wars are difficult to figure out,” he said.

But the MLB Players Association (MLBPA) has long opposed a salary cap, which it maintains would deprive players of potential earnings. Last year, then-MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark, called a cap “institutionalized collusion.” Clark and others have also criticized MLB’s revenue-sharing system, which they claim enables small-market owners to pocket profits generated by more competitive teams.

Both sides have been preparing for a prolonged standoff. The players’ union has amassed hundreds of millions of dollars to sustain its members through lost paychecks, while owners have built up their own financial reserves. A delayed start to next season risks dulling fan interest, especially if it lasts more than a few months. While fans are often forgiving of brief labor disputes, “they didn’t seem to come back nearly as quickly in ’94,” noted Matheson. “They do risk losing this momentum that they have.”

But for this spring, at least, it looks like baseball fans have good reasons to hope that their sport isn’t set on a long path of decline. “It’s a totally different story today than I would have been telling you in 2019,” said Matheson.

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