Three-day weekends like this one traditionally include a lot of baseball-watching among baseball fans.

One wonders who future baseball fans will watch, based on this Wall Street Journal story:

As nationwide participation numbers continue to decline, some local youth leagues are reaching a breaking point.

Unable to field enough teams to form a self-contained league, they face a choice between playing teams from surrounding areas, merging with nearby leagues or disbanding altogether. Either way, the game becomes less easily accessible to the casual player, a dying breed in an era of specialization in youth sports.

This shift threatens to cost Major League Baseball millions of potential fans, raising concerns about the league’s future at a time when revenues are soaring and attendance is strong.

“The biggest predictor of fan avidity as an adult is whether you played the game,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said. An MLB spokesman cited fan polling conducted by the league last year as proof. When asked to assess the factors that drove their interest in sports, fans between the ages of 12 and 17 cited participation as a major factor more often than watching or attending the sport. That was particularly true among male fans in that age group, 70% of which cited “playing the sport” as a big factor in building their interest.

Since replacing Bud Selig in January, Manfred has been especially focused on increasing youth interest in baseball. The league recently began working with ESPN to prominently feature local Little League teams during Sunday Night Baseball telecasts. MLB brings the teams to the games, and ESPN shows them during the broadcast. An MLB spokesman said the league also plans to announce a major youth initiative in the coming weeks.

But MLB faces headwinds that have been years in the making and forces that are outside its direct control. In 2002, nine million people between the ages of 7 and 17 played baseball in the U.S., according to the National Sporting Goods Association, an industry trade group. By 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, that figure had dropped by more than 41%, to 5.3 million. Likewise, youth softball participation declined from 5.4 million to 3.2 million over the same span.

Other popular sports, including soccer and basketball, have suffered as youth sports participation in general has declined and become more specialized. A pervasive emphasis on performance over mere fun and exercise has driven many children to focus exclusively on one sport from an early age, making it harder for all sports to attract casual participants. But the decline of baseball as a community sport has been especially precipitous. …

In more affluent areas, the best alternatives are merely inconvenient. Nearby towns pool teams together for an interleague schedule or merge their leagues outright. At its entry level, the sport requires players to leave their communities for games more often than before. …

While neighborhood games become increasingly scarce, year-round travel teams have never been more prevalent. The U.S. Specialty Sports Association, the dominant organizing body for travel baseball, said it has around 1.3 million players spread across 80,000 teams, more than double what it had 10 years ago. The company’s website includes national rankings for teams in age groups that begin at “4 and under.”

Ismael Gonzalez, who manages the Miami-based 9-and-under team MVP Juniors Elite, said his team travels throughout the Southeast, playing more than 100 games a year and practicing two or three days a week. “These kids work like machines,” he said. “This is not just for fun. This is their lifestyle.”

But the cost of that lifestyle—thousands of dollars a year in many cases—puts it out of reach for many parents. It skews heavily white: A 15-year study of travel teams by Nebraska researcher David Ogden found that only 3% of players are black. And its popularity has made baseball more of a niche sport, precisely what MLB wants to avoid at the spectator level.

“The kids who have been playing baseball since they were 18 months old, they’re going to be baseball fans,” said Mark Hyman, a George Washington University sports management professor and author of three books on youth sports. “But MLB can’t rely on them exclusively. There needs to be opportunities for kids who are not going to be Willie Mays and don’t even want to be Willie Mays.”

There are other reasons mentioned in the comments, including some parents emphasizing individual sports such as running, baseball being more fun to play than to watch, baseball being boring to play if you’re not a pitcher or catcher, Major League Baseball being boring to watch, the usual assortment of other physical (other sports) and nonphysical (involving some sort of computer) activities, and this indictment of today’s culture: “… parents keep their kids in a bubble of activities coupled with the irrational fear, in most cases, of prohibiting their kids to bike over to a local park alone to play.”

The counterpoint is to look at baseball’s overall attendance, the highest of any professional sport in the world. Of course, if your favorite major professional sport played 2,430 regular-season games every year, it too would lead the world in attendance, since no other sport gets remotely close to that number of games played each year. Average attendance, however, drops baseball to second, at, according to Statistica, 30,437 per game in 2014–15. behind the National Football League and ahead of Major League Soccer, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association.

The more interesting number (which doesn’t seem to be available) is percentage of seats sold. The NFL percentage is well over 90 percent, and the NHL and NBA numbers are more than 90 percent. The MLB number is around 70 percent. Part of the reason is that MLB teams have difficulty selling seats for an entire 81-game home schedule when the team falls out of contention for the postseason. (In the case of the Brewers, that was approximately April 15.) The owners of baseball are loath to turn away money (though one wonders how much profit a team makes when, say, 20,000 people show up for a game as opposed to 40,000), but one thing MLB might consider is shortening its season by, say, a month, not only in order to play postseason games in decent weather, but to tighten up the schedule and make each game mean more.

But part of the reason also must have to do with baseball’s very nature as the hardest sport to play, as anyone who has swung and missed at a pitch can demonstrate. (Golf is hard enough, and the ball doesn’t move off the tee.) Hitting a baseball is so difficult that .300 — seven out of 10 failures — is the mark of a good player. And anyone who has tried to get a baseball across home plate in the knees-to-armpits strike zone knows that successful pitching isn’t any easier. (I speak from experience in both cases.) A lot of kids who don’t succeed at something right away don’t stick with it.