Baseball is known as America’s pastime, and it is also the oldest game that has been played in America. Even though baseball still has a lot of fans, basketball and football are leaving baseball in the dust when it comes to television viewership these days. In the past decade, Fox MLB Saturday regular season games have declined by nearly one million viewers. Almost the same exact number decline can be said for ESPN’s Sunday night baseball (Bergson, 2015). One big reason that baseball has struggled in popularity compared to basketball and football is because there are so many games during the regular season (162). There are only 82 regular season games for the NBA and 16 for the NFL.
| Region | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northeast | 19.8 | 20.3 | 20.3 | 19.4 |
| Midwest | 24 | 26.2 | 24.7 | 25.7 |
| South | 34.5 | 32.9 | 34.6 | 32.8 |
| West | 21.7 | 20.7 | 20.4 | 22.1 |
| Total | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
Nearly one out of every three people in the U.S. that watch baseball on TV live in the South. This is one reason the Atlanta Braves are the most popular team in so many southern states according to the Facebook data presented above. Also, the South has the highest MLB viewership percentage of 32.8% and this is 7% more than the next highest region which is the Midwest. I think this is no coincidence that the South is the highest, because at least from where I am from in Mississippi, there is a huge emphasis on youth baseball. The main league in my area is Dixie Youth baseball. Even though Mississippi is several hundred miles from Georgia, the most popular MLB team is the Atlanta Braves.
