Bill James pens a piece at his site entitled Wit (subscription required):

Some old, dead writer defined “Wit” as “discovering likeness in things unlike”. This article is about finding likenesses in things unlike—hence, the title. It’s not “witty” in the modern sense of the word.

Reminds me of this:

It’s a typical Jamesian article, in which he brings together many seemingly unrelated threads. The main takeaway, however, is on the aging audience for baseball:

Music, like sport, is instinctive to us, exists in all cultures, and will never disappear. There are primal and sophisticated forms of music and of sport, which could also be called vibrant and calcified, or youthful and moribund. There is a spectrum in these activities that runs from vibrant, primal and youthful to sophisticated, calcified and moribund. All sports and all forms of music move across that spectrum, crawling toward obsolescence. Rock and roll has moved significantly to the right on that spectrum in the last 40 years; the very term “classic rock” suggests this. Football has lurched dramatically to the right.

But football and rock and roll are not as far advanced on this death march as is baseball. Baseball players, like symphony musicians, are fantastically highly trained, and go through many layers of selection and rejection before they reach the highest levels. A baseball game is extremely expensive to stage. Even a youth baseball game now is relatively expensive to stage. Kids no longer perceive that they can play baseball in an empty lot with rocks and pieces of junk to mark the bases. Baseball now can only be played on manicured fields, which cities pay to maintain because youth baseball is perceived as a social good. The baseball audience is aging.

This is not a jeremiad. Baseball has massive resources, and is in little danger of passing away in the next generation through calcification and decay. But neither does this represent a simple problem, that can be addressed by advertising targeted at young people. Both baseball and classical music, for their own good, need to think deeply about how to re-energize themselves, how to make themselves younger, more vibrant, more accessible and less expensive. It’s called hardening of the arteries. It kills us all sooner or later.

The problem with the last bit is that baseball is expensive because it is in demand. Baseball was cheap in the 1950s, but no one went to games. Look at the attendance for 1954. That should have been a pretty good year. Cleveland broke the Yankees stranglehold on the AL pennant. Willie Mays posted his first great season. The Braves moved to Milwaukee, and played a 20 year old named Hank Aaron. The Braves were the only team to draw more than 20,000 per game that season. Today, if a team is under 20,000 per game, it’s considered a big problem.

In many ways, however, baseball is cheap. For about $200 a year, I can watch and/or listen to nearly every broadcast of every game in high definition. For free, I can watch every pitch on MLB.com. There is a network that gives me history and analysis of the game 24 hours a day. Anyone who so desires can be immersed in the game like never before.

I’m also not sure that the way you play the game as a child makes you a fan. I never played organized ball, but we held pickup games all the time. We’d show up at the empty lot across from George Shawah’s house every Saturday at 10 AM. We’d play baseball in the warm weather, football in the cold weather. I was a fan first, however. I played because I loved the game, I didn’t fall in love with the game by playing.

So the baseball audience is getting older? Fine. Come to the game when you are thirty or forty. You’ll have more money to throw at the sport, and your maturity will allow you to appreciate the pace, and that there’s always something new and interesting happening. When we start living to 150 years, you’ll have a century of enjoyment!