How to fix baseball from dying. Please add your suggestions to mine.

[Moostache]

14. The game is what was the constant across eras and generations...

You start messing with that and you may as well shut it all down.

Money is the problem...when I was in college (some 25 years ago) the MINIMUM salary for a major league player was somewhere around $50,000 still. A very decent living back then to be sure, but not extravagant or obscene. The top players in the game were getting $2-4M a season. Tickets to the games (at least bleacher seats at Old Comiskey Park) were $5-7. A beer was $5 but a dog and popcorn was less than $5.

There were neighborhood bars and restaurants that offered parking discounts and game day specials to draw in customers. It was a much better experience than being forced to get food and refreshments ONLY in the stadium and from team operated sources. (St. Louis is a little different than my latest experiences at the "new" Comiskey Park in Chicago...not as draconian, and also a much more fan friendly experience...so its not ALL teams.)

Fast forward to now. The team has bought up all the land within 5 blocks of the stadium. Many (if not all) of the neighborhood establishments are gone. Parking is a minimum of $10. Beers are the same. Hot dog by itself is $7+. Player salaries are obscene - $400M + deals? Major league MINIMUM has been over $1M for at least the last 5 years.

In the game's heydey of the 20's through the 50's, ball players lived in the neighborhoods by the home stadium. Many of them held off-season jobs in the community. There were fewer teams, more daytime doubleheaders, fewer pitching changes and a faster pace of play. The game was the same...quirky ballpark dimensions aside.

The problem (aside from the insidious and pervasive influence of $$$) is that WE (the people) have changed for the worse... Where we once read the evening paper or the morning edition, we now get Tweets and instant feedback of scores and stats. Where the game used to be described in papers and key moments almost mythologized for the reader, now its cold, fast, lifeless.

When I was a boy, I lived, breathed and died baseball from March through October every year. I loved the game like nothing else...much more than football or basketball. That all changed for me in 1994. That was THE YEAR....my boyhood team - the White Sox - had the best team in the American League by far, they had lost in the '93 playoffs to Toronto, but in '94 they were FINALLY going to make the World Series, until....the strike wiped out the post-season and the World Series. I have never fully recovered my love of the game. I cheered in '05 when the White Sox finally made it to and won a World Series...I cheered my adopted home town Cardinals in their many post-season trips over the last 25 years...but it has never been the same since for me...and sadly it never will.

Between too much technology, too short of attention spans and too much $$$ perverting everything, the game and the romance of it all has been lost. Its now no more than a soccer/"futbol" analog game...usually not much scoring, a lot of nuanced defending and strategy and nothing like the more popular sports of football and basketball.