Victory Field, Indianapolis (AAA #21 - Will baseball be one of the Big Four sports in 2125?)

Indianapolis is a city that doesn’t have major league baseball, but it does have other “major league” teams (the NFL Colts and the NBA Pacers), as well as the event that draws, as far as I can tell, the largest single-day paid attendance of any sporting event in the U.S., year after year, the Indianapolis 500. Plus, Indy hosted the NCAA Final Four last weekend, another huge sporting event. So baseball is not the biggest sporting event in town here, but major league baseball is clearly one of the “Big Four” professional sports in the U.S., and has been for a hundred years. Will it stay that way?

Defining the Big Four

Most references at the moment, including the Wikipedia article, refer to a “Big Four” of professional sports leagues in the U.S. and Canada, MLB, the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL). Although I love the NHL (the only sport other than baseball where I’ve ever had a season ticket to a professional team is the late Arizona Coyotes hockey team), I think that it’s definitely #4 of the group, but there will be a reason to talk about a Big Four in another context later.

There are a couple of obvious ways to defining the “Big” sports. One is total revenue, in which the NFL is first, MLB is second (or tied for second with the NBA), and the NHL brings up the rear. Another is attendance, where MLB, which plays the most games, has by far the highest total attendance, the NFL, which plays the fewest, the highest per-game attendance, and the NBA and NHL are similar, slightly ahead of the NFL in total attendance and bringing up the rear in per-game attendance.

More details are below, but I think it’s fair to say that NFL, MLB, NBA  and NHL are the Big Four for the U.S. and Canada.

On a worldwide basis, attendance figures suggest that there might be a Big Four, as well. Soccer is the runaway #1, but Formula I draws massive crowds around the globe, and baseball and rugby each have leagues in three different countries that are among the top 23 in average attendance.

A hundred years ago

In considering  whether baseball will stay in the top tier, it’s interesting to look back a century. I’ve heard references to a Big Three in 1926, and while baseball was in it, the other two were horse racing and boxing, which aren’t team sports, and aren’t on most people’s radar any more. Quick, anyone know the name of the heavyweight boxing champion or reining Derby champion? I had to look it up (it’s Oleksandr Usyk and Sovreignty). Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champion in 1926, and while I hadn’t heard of the Derby champion (Bubbline Over), only five years earlier a racehorse (Man o’ War) was named athlete of the year along with Babe Ruth.

Meanwhile, there really were no other team sports leagues of significance in North America.

·      The five-year-old NFL still had teams in places like Rock Island, Hammond, Dayton, and Canton. Of the league’s 23 teams that year, eight played less than eight games, some only one. Only four of those franchises still exist. The forward pass had become legal 19 years earlier.

·       The eight-year-old NHL had seven teams, four of which still exist. It was close to stability.

·       The NBA was another 21 years from existence. The game had only been invented three decades earlier.

·       One the other hand, baseball’s National League had been founded 45 years earlier, all 16 MLB teams playing were more than 20 years old, and all those franchises still exist (most still in the same city).

The transition from one Big Three to another

How and why did horseracing and boxing get replaced by football, basketball, and ice hockey?

When it comes to the horses, I don’t have any data to back it up, but I suspect that a big part of it has to do with the fact that in 1926, horses were much more familiar to Americans than they are today. A much larger fraction of the population lived on farms, where horses did much of the work. Even in cities, delivery horses were common.

As for boxing, there was a lot of collegiate boxing in the 1920s, and once the NCAA started running national championships, boxing was one of the sports contested. But by 1960, the number of schools in the NCAA boxing championship had dropped to 20 (from a high of 55), and when there was a death in the championships that year, that was the end of NCAA boxing. Similarly, boxing was regularly televised on network TV from 1946 to 1964, but the death of a fighter after a televised bout in 1962 spelled the end for that. My take on it is that the number of fatalities became socially unacceptable.

A snapshot of the transition from one Big Three to another is to look at 50 years ago, 1976. Horseracing still was somewhat popular (Secretariat had won the Kentucky Derby in 1973), and while boxing was declining, Muhammad Ali was undoubtedly the best-known athlete in the world, although the number of bouts was down and college boxing and regularly televised boxing were gone.

Meanwhile, the NFL had expanded, made peace with an upstart rival league, and started calling its championship the Super Bowl a few years earlier, and was clearly on the rise. I don’t know whether it or MLB was bringing in more money then, but I suspect they were close. I don’t think the NBA was on a level with NFL and MLB, but college basketball’s Final Four had become a huge deal (UCLA was just finishing its run of nine national titles in 11 years), and NBA popularity followed. The NHL had just expanded from six teams (four in northeastern U.S. cities, two in Canada) to 12, adding six teams in the U.S., including two in California.

What will the Big Three (or Four) be in 2125?

The current Big Four all look healthy at the moment, but they are in different places. Basketball and ice hockey, in particular, have become more international games, and baseball is drawing more players from Asia and Latin America than in the past. Football remains a uniquely American sport. Furthermore, football has a potential image problem like boxing did in the 1950s and 1960s with the growing understanding of the potential for brain injuries, although the NFL is trying to address that.

Will another sports league grow to rival the current Big Four? The league that looks like it has the best shot is MLS, which has the advantage of being the world’s most popular sport, and is growing rapidly. Two women’s leagues, in basketball (WNBA) and soccer (NWSL) are also growing rapidly, but they have a long way to go. The individual sports, like golf and tennis, have waxed and waned, but have never enjoyed the widespread popularity of team sports, or of boxing or horse racing in the 1920s. Contraption sports, like car and bicycle racing (maybe I should add skiing), are popular, but don’t seem ready to threaten the Big Four, at least in the U.S. (worldwide, I think Formula I is bigger than any of the U.S. Big Four). Could it be an old sport that’s rediscovered, like lacrosse (there are now professional leagues) or curling (which TV viewers fall in love with every four years at the Winter Olympics)? Or will it be some sport that, like basketball in 1926, isn’t that old, but is growing? Pickleball or Ultimate Frisbee, anyone?

The game: Louisville Bats 8, Indianapolis Indians 2

In the top of the first, Indianapolis starting pitcher Antwone Kelly threw a 97 mph fastball for a strike on the second or third pitch of the game. It was all downhill from there.

He walked that hitter, and two more later, threw a wild pitch, and gave up a long home run. His defense didn’t help him much either. The left fielder bobbled the ball as he was fielding a base hit (although that miscue didn’t cause any damage), then dropped what looked like a routine fly ball for an error. The second baseman let what looked like a routine ground ball go through his legs for another error.  

Then the manager brought in the second pitcher of the first inning. At this point, it was 5-0, and the Bats were still batting. The pitcher who came in, Cam Fuller, finished that inning without further damage (and pitched three more scoreless innings). In the bottom of the first, the Indians had runners on second and third base with out one and a run in, and it looked like it might be a wild one, but in fact the game was basically over. No one scored again until the 8^th inning, and when that happened, it was just the Bats padding their lead.

The Bat who hit the first-inning home run was Michael Toglia, who hit 25 home runs (??led the team??) for the Colorado Rockies in 2024. Remarkably, he wasn’t the player in the lineup who had hit the most in the majors the season before last. Teammate J.J. Bleday hit 20 for Oakland. Both were considered rising stars, but both tailed off badly last year, and both ended up in the Cincinnati Reds system, hoping to get a second chance.

More numbers, and the links

This section is just more details on the numbers, including some links where you can find out, for example, how Gaelic football attendance in Ireland compares to cricket attendance in India.

I think one of the best measures of the size of a sport’s popularity is total revenue. There, the National Football League (NFL) is the most lucrative league, with nearly $17 billion per year, while MLB and the National Basketball Association (NBA) are in a near tie with $10.9B. Then come the National Hockey League (NHL) at $6.8B and Major League Soccer (MLS) at $2.0B. The English Premier League, incidentally, slots in as the world’s fourth most lucrative league, in front of the NHL. U.S. college sports are also close to the Big Four. The most recent numbers I could find were from 2019, when NCAA schools generated nearly $19 billion in revenue, almost all of that from football and basketball (in that order). A more comprehensive, but older, list, has the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), the Canadian Football League (CFL), and the Women’s NBA (WNBA), next, in that order, all well under $1B. The WNBA has been growing rapidly, though, so I’m not sure they haven’t surpassed the CFL.

I usually hadn’t counted the NCAA when thinking about professional sports teams, since they were, in theory at least, amateurs. But with the move to “NIL” (Name, Image and Likeness) compensation, college basketball players are making up to $4.2 million per year. That’s no longer amateur by any definition. College basketball and football have been growing for years, but I think that with the conversion to explicit payment, and the transfer portal that allows college athletes to change schools each year, that many smaller colleges will stop trying to compete in the recruiting process with the big-time schools. Actually, I think that college athletics has now become much more similar to the baseball minor leagues of the early 20^th Century than to college sports of that era, because the players are compensated (though not at the level of the major leagues), and don’t have any reason to stay with the team they’re playing for if they get a better offer (in terms of playing time or money) elsewhere.  

Another way to measure popularity is attendance. MLB attendance last year was 71.4 million, the highest since 2017, though below the record of 79 million in 2002. It’s not fair to compare to other sports, because the number of contests is different. Of the North American leagues, the league with the highest total attendance by far (in fact, the highest total attendance in the world by a factor of two) is MLB, but it also plays the most games. Per game attendance is highest in the NFL, which plays the fewest (except for the CFL), while NHL and NBA are similar in attendance.

The Indianapolis 500 has the single biggest paying crowds (about 350,000 each Memorial Day), although the New York City marathon boasts that they have 2.5 million spectators along their 26-mile route.

And then there’s Formula I, which draws 100,000 to 500,000 for each of 24 races around the world. I think there’s a “Big Two” in professional sports worldwide, with soccer the clear number one (the European soccer leagues combined draw more than MLB, and that doesn’t count the Latin American and Asian leagues) and Formula I number two. The only one of the American Big Four that has a league outside the US which cracks the top 23 leagues in average attendance worldwide (don’t ask me why the Wikipedia article doesn’t give the top 20 or the top 25) is baseball, where the Japanese league is eighth (slightly higher average attendance than MLB, though with fewer teams playing fewer games) and the Korean league is 22^nd. Rugby also has three leagues in the top 23. Euroleague basketball drew a total of 3 million in attendance in its last season, more than 10,000 per game, and a dozen European hockey clubs drew more than 10,000 per game, and hockey and baseball games are played indoors, with smaller arenas than baseball or rugby. So after soccer and FI, I’m not sure where to place baseball, rugby, hockey and basketball. In both attendance and revenue (four leagues in three countries in the top 30), baseball is next, and its clearly the leader in Eastern Asia, the Caribbean, and northern Latin America, so maybe it’s number three. Rugby is clearly the leader in the southern hemisphere; ice hockey and basketball are the next most popular in Europe. Cricket, meanwhile, is wildly popular in many parts of the former British empire (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, part of the Carribean, Australia and New Zealand).