re: The decreased interest in baseball is evident on this board

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I couldn't name 5 guys on the Giants and Royals combined.

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It's been said ad nauseum, but the MLB does an absolutely horrendous job of marketing itself, its teams and its stars. To boot, even when they try to go all in on marketing a star, they go overboard (as they did with Jeter) and it becomes a turnoff.

And it's crazy because the shelf life of an MLB star is three times what it is for a non-QB NFL player, yet guys like Arian Foster have Toyota commercials. They'd be well served by not having a 128 year old commissioner who can't identify with the 18-35 demographic at all.

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I lost interest completely at some point. I'm not even quite sure why, but I know I am not alone in this.

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Ditto. I used to be an enormous baseball fan as a kid, and I taped the All Star Game and World Series every year, and I was right there for every McGwire and Sosa homer in 1998. Somewhere along the way I just completely lost interest, and it had nothing to do with the strike or PEDs.

I'm not saying baseball is dead or dying by any stretch of the imagination, but baseball has rapidly lost the casual fan, and there's no way to rationalize or spin it. Casual fans are what drive ratings and general sport popularity -- losing them is never a good thing.