I don't know why people in these comments are dragging politics into it. That strikes me as a terminally online take and I say that as an self-confessed politics frog.
If anything, the following of current events overall is way down to what it was decades ago by the general populace. People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
Three things happened to baseball (IMHO):
1. The childhood funnel is drying up and has been for a long time. Kids now increasingly play soccer instead;
2. Take out the nostalgia and you're not left with much. There are too many games, they're too long and not enough happens. Football is bigger than ever; and
3. Structurally I think baseball made some huge mistakes, such as the soft salary cap system that created dynasties like the New York Yankees who could get rich on broadcast rights for a huge media market. The NFL has managed all of this so much better.
I'm not a huge sports fan but I find the systems fascinating. American sports evolved into a 3 pillar system. Basketball season into baseball season into football season through the calendar year. I wonder if baseball's timing over summer has contributed to this decline.
> I don't know why people in these comments are dragging politics into it.
It dominates news coverage even when we're not coming up on an election, and the high stakes involved makes it an even bigger topic, and one that weighs heavily on people's minds.
> People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
The wealth of information available (and disinformation avilable) is partly to blame. It's easy to spend your time only on a small number of interests. Most people just let the algorithms of a small number of corporations feed them the vast majority of what they consume, so while technically there's a lot more information out there, they only see what those corporations choose to show them.
On point 2: in my experience, the tradeoff is that baseball is the most accessible in-person major league sport. The quantity, length, and seasonal timing of games means that tickets are almost always affordable and can fit into my schedule. I go to more and more MLB games every year, whereas a ticket to my NFL team is a serious expenditure, and that's assuming that my schedule works out to where I can attend one of 8 home games for the entire year.
The NFL and MLB seem to have similar numbers of recent dynasties and of different teams that have won a championship.