Baseball Decline Quotes

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.

I am alarmed at the subtle invasion of professional football, which is gaining preeminence over baseball. It's unthinkable.

Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way.

In 2002, in this country, there was an observation that for the first time in America, more kids were actively pursuing skateboarding than baseball.

At the high school level, the coaches get these kids in revenue-driven sports and take them away from baseball. There's so much pressure on these kids to even play spring football. We need to get the African-American players back in the game, which I think would make it not only a better game, but more exciting and entertaining for everyone.

Don't try to tell Namath's people on First Avenue about Babe Ruth, because they don't even know the name. In fact, with the young, you can forget all of baseball. The sport is gone. But if you ever have seen Ruth, and then you see Namath, you know there is very little difference.

It wasn't really until the 10th or 11th grade when I started to play well, and football took the place of baseball, which was my love when I was five years old. I don't know what happened; baseball just got boring to me, I guess.

There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance -- physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its ''national pastime'' pedestal in less than fifteen years.

Along the way they're (MLB) going to lose millions of more American fans.