Question posed by Judge Landis

[packs]

For all the wrong reasons 1998 was probably the zenith of the modern game. I can't think of another time in modern media where baseball was featured so heavily again across every medium and was so widely talked about by everyone.

[rats60]

1978 was baseball's peak. It has been in decline ever since, replaced by the NFL as our country's sport of choice.

[Brent G.]

Originally Posted by packs

For all the wrong reasons 1998 was probably the zenith of the modern game. I can't think of another time in modern media where baseball was featured so heavily again across every medium and was so widely talked about by everyone.

I don't see any way that's duplicated again, in any sport.

Might've also been the peak for forged autos -- The Chase and Michael Jordan's last championship run. The forgers were BUSY.

[mortimer brewster]

Early 1960's.

The NFL championship game of 1958 showed how exciting football could be on the medium of television. The popularity of the sport exploded.

[Hankphenom]

What other sport could sustain interest over 200+ games a year? Answer: not a one. The others are great, but the Babe said it best in his farewell: "The only real game, I think, is baseball." I have no idea what he meant by that, but hey, it's the Babe!

[Cubanball]

When I first read this question the first thing that came to mind was the decade of the 1970s. But baseball likes metrics so I looked up some numbers. I looked at year by year World Series viewership and this is what I found. The highest average Series game viewership for any year 1968 to 2024 was in 1978. The 1978 World Series had 44.279 million viewers, the highest ever. Compare this to 1998 with 20.34 million viewers or the lowest all-time in 2023 with 9 million viewers. So yes according to this baseball peaked in 1978.

[doug.goodman]

Average MLB game attendance peaked in 2007

[Chris-Counts]

I believe baseball's greatest era came in 1945-49. There was never a time where baseball was more popular than during the waning days of WWII, and during the next few years. Attendance starts going crazy in late 1945. The war had just ended, and soldiers were coming home in large numbers. Night games were suddenly the rage. MLB attendance in 1945 hit 10 million for the first time, and doubled to 20 million in three years. Baseball Reference lists 70 different professional leagues that operated in 1947 — compare that to today. There was minor league baseball in literally hundreds of cities and towns across the country. In 1950, TV comes out, and it's another 12 years before MLB has 20 million fans, and expansion is needed to make it happen. Also, Cuban baseball and women's baseball thrived like never before or since. On a relative level, baseball's true Golden Age happens right after WWII — there was never a time when a greater percentage of the population was fixated on the game.

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