This exceedingly non scientific poll is still surprising in that a small sample of predominantly white, male, and older fans who care enough about baseball for most of the year to obsess on the ups and downs of one team, quite decisively don’t care enough about the sport to see how the story ends.
It has long been obvious that the situation is bad for younger people, minorities, and women, as the Times story today did a good job of capturing, but it is even worse that the sport to the likes of us is only compelling until we don’t see the laundry we grew up caring about. That’s so not good and the tweaks being considered don’t seem likely to fix this march toward descending to NHL localized ratings.
I personally answered #5 —that I will see about half of the WS— because I tend to fall asleep around 10:30-11, which is roughly the fifth inning of most of these playoff games. I’d rather be functional in the morning than see if something interesting happens around midnight in a slog between two teams I’m indifferent about.