MLB Attendance: Some solutions for another year’s decline

Everybody seems to have at least a couple of ideas about the MLB attendance problem; here are two guys’ notions, some old, some new.

A longtime friend pointed me in the direction of an explanation for the continuing MLB attendance drop. He suggested an article by Glen Macnow, a Philadelphia columnist, sports talk radio host, and partner in a brewing firm located not far at all from my home.

Macnow is a genial gentleman whose sports talk show on weekends with Hall of Fame football writer Ray Didinger is a marvel of intelligence and gentle humor, a stark contrast to many sports talk shoutfests on the airwaves.

My friend was referring to his recent column for Metro USA, and suggested Macnow had asserted that MLB attendance woes were the fault of analytics. This was a tiny bit off the mark, since the title of the writer’s piece was “The smarter baseball gets, the more tedious it becomes,” but Macnow does follow up his opening by noting a 1.4 percent drop in MLB attendance thus far this year.

And that drop, he asserts, is because “the national pastime is increasingly slow, boring and one-dimensional.” His overall pronouncement? “The sport has become a snooze fest of ‘three true outcomes’ – walks, strikeouts and home runs.” It’s not clear whom Macnow is quoting there on outcomes, but that’s an admirable sentence.