​Few American institutions illustrate the dynamics of creative destruction quite so vividly as baseball in the 21st century. Television empires have emerged and then been destroyed; streaming platforms have filled the void. New rules have been implemented, games have gotten shorter, and computers call balls and strikes. Attendance has stabilized after years of hand wringing about the game dying.Baseball is being seen by more people, in more ways, than ever before. The catastrophic collapse of the regional sports network model has paradoxically opened the sport to a broader audience. Rule changes have made games crisper and faster. Streaming minutes on MLB platforms have grown by more than 50 percent in just four years. Platforms like Netflix get exclusive rights to show marquee events like the Home Run Derby.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut there is a hidden ball trick: Mass audiences can’t actually watch the games, at least not in the way they did for the past 75 years. For decades, families saw games and developed lifelong loyalties, usually at home but often by going to the ballpark. They were fans of a baseball team. Today, much of the increase in viewership has come from people who are not fans but who have an intense interest in one game, not a team. They place bets, highly specific and often arcane bets, and they watch to see if they won the bet, rather than if their team won the game.The result is that more people are watching baseball, but fewer are falling in love with it.There was a time when boxing was the most-watched sport in America. The 1978 heavyweight championship between Leon Spinks and Muhammad Ali drew an estimated 90 million television viewers, with roughly 47 percent of all TVs in the United States tuned to the same fight on the same night. Not just a sport, boxing was a shared national event.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThen came the pivot to pay-per-view. The Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao “Fight of the Century” in 2015 reached approximately 4.6 million households—less than 4 percent of the audience that had watched Spinks and Ali. Viewers paid around $140 in today’s dollars, and the revenue was considerable. But boxing sacrificed its mass appeal, along with something harder to quantify: the cultural presence that makes a sport matter to people who are not already devoted fans.Boxing appeared to be dying. Then came the November 2024 Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight—or farce. That event generated 65 million concurrent streams on Netflix alone, the most-watched single streaming event in history at the time. But many viewers were tuning in to check on prop bets—How long will the national anthem run? Will the fight start late? How many rounds? How many knockdowns?—rather than out of any love for the sport.Baseball is not boxing. But the structural pressures are similar, and the trajectory bears watching.For much of the 20th century, baseball’s relationship with TV was uncomplicated and mutual