Sports Illustrated In March 2021 By Tom Verducci

With baseball’s declining popularity many are left asking themselves, why is baseball dying? In this research narrative, I am going to be answering that question. This is a question that I am personally connected to as a baseball fan. Like other baseball lovers, I grew up playing and watching baseball during the spring and summer. Baseball has always been such an important part of my life. I would spend my days throwing a baseball against the brick wall of my home's foundation, hoping that I threw it hard enough to not get stopped by the partly overgrown weeds. If I wasn’t throwing the ball to my own wall I could be found throwing the ball to my friends and my little brother. I would spend most of the spring and fall at the local rec park

Verducci talks about the pace of play problems that many deem as the reason baseball is seen as boring. I think Verducci best summarizes what many feel is baseball's single biggest flaw “Over the past decade baseball has given fans the antithesis of what it takes to compete in a crowded battle for consumers’ increasingly fickle attention: less action over a longer period of time. The decline of baseball’s entertainment value has accelerated since 2015 as the explosion of analytics has replaced athleticism with a “thought contest” in which mountains of information favor not just run prevention but keeping the ball out of play” (Verducci). Many fans and baseball experts have always expressed that baseball becoming too analytical can be costly for not only the viewing experience but can have unforeseen effects on the outcome of games, the best example of this is in the sixth game of the 2020 World Series. Kevin Cash who is the Tampa Bay Rays manager pulls out Blake Snell who had been pitching very well because of the analytics that throughout most of the MLB, batters get better going against a pitcher for the third time, which was about to happen for Blake Snell, this decision ended up not only costing the Rays the game but because the score-line in the best of 7 series was 3-2 favoring their opponents the Los Angeles Dodgers this also cost them the entire series. Verducci also mentions in this article that the MLB executives are going to be trying new rules in the lower levers of the minor leagues to attempt to help the pace of play