ABC just canceled a couple of them, and are replacing them with cooking shows.  Cooking shows have been all the rage ever since the genre (and niche cable network) was infiltrated by the pornography industry.  Obviously it’s a long term change by society which has lead to the gradual demise — though they were the most video-taped television programs–, but the immediate demise of soap operas is linked to Procter and Gamble’s advertising decision — they have enough of a monopoly over cleaning supplies, I suppose.  I thought maybe the remaining shows were the true legacy programs which started out on radio and carried over on television — but looking it up, they appear not to be .

I can’t say I weep.  Neither do I weep for this…

It’s an evergreen news story anyway.  And an evergreen point of discussion.  Last year I listened to a bunch of old guys talk wistfully on the new baseball season, striking this note “The game’s not followed by as many people as it used to be.”

“The days of kids being born with a glove next to their ear in the crib and boys playing catch in the backyard by age three, those are over,” said Len Coleman, the former president of the National League.

Coleman, who counts Hall of Famers Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson as close friends, said he watched his son, now 23, drop baseball as a teenager for soccer—the sport he starred in at Georgetown University. “I even tried to keep him interested by having him catch so he’d be involved in every play,” Coleman said.

According to scouts, the declining numbers are beginning to alter the talent pool in ways that could have a noticeable impact on player quality. “There are still players, but there aren’t the numbers out there anymore,” said David Bloom, a scout with the Baltimore Orioles. “The great players just don’t stand out like they used to.”

A funny thing here –  The Oregonian recently published an editorial for the local focus on such matters — Portland’s triple A baseball team has departed and a major league soccer team has replaced the minor league soccer team (both minor in comparison with world competition).

I know they published it because it was in the letter to the editor section today — a couple of people bemoaning the demise of baseball.

I thoroughly enjoyed Rick Attig’s April 11 piece, “Picture day in Mudville,” in which he laments the local decline in baseball interest. As a former youth coach and administrator — and hopeless baseball geek — I’ve studied this issue closely.
Have you?

One of baseball’s great appeals is its demographic diversity. People from all economic walks of life love the game. My grandfather, an industrial painter, took me to many Portland Beavers games in the ’60s.
I observed over the years and from major league cities that a large number of baseball aficionados were blue-collar folks who made a decent wage. I’ve seen this at various levels of the game — factory cities generally make for good baseball towns. Prospering businesses that manufacture or build are typically big sponsors of youth baseball.
I submit that waning support for baseball, except for its most avid fans, has a lot to do with the decline of our manufacturing sector, which reduces a significant base of local support.
When we decide to reinvigorate our manufacturing sector and actually start making things again, baseball will be a wonderful side benefit. Without the support of a solid working-class society, baseball may be down to its last strike.

Interesting.  The Wall Street Journal article begins with a kid from major baseball family claiming the sport is “too slow”.  I note that he wrote a letter to the editor, which sits side by side with another letter on the same topic.  I also note that the article’s appearance on the Oregonian website comes with zero reader comments.  Of course, print is decaying as well — the recent closing of Border’s and recent layoff at Powell’s testify to that — the IPAD surged ahead of book sales at amazon.com last year.  I welcome this new digitized future.  I had an argument a while ago with someone bemoaning the fretful day when books will all be loaded onto your ipad device, but   there are shows on television which shows society’s contempt for clutter, so if we have to follow those dictates, I’d just have to leave clutter of volumes of books and music somehow —

No, it’s not all positive.  We’ve become a world of writers –but not necessarily good or insightful writers, and writers who often adhere to a tight format of 140 characters or less.  (I wonder if Haikus came about from a lost technology that forced this stricture — sure, the wikipedia article makes this claim of evolution, but I bet it came from limited gigabytes.)

Also, wasn’t the Strike of 94 baseball’s last strike — or was it baseball’s first strike?  No, it was revitalized through the use of Steroids — maybe we can get it pumped up again if we agree as a society to look the other way on that issue again.

I don’t know what will happen with Portland’s “Major League Soccer” franchise.  The current ad campaign is content on focusing on the fans in the stand, which propelled attendance over the past few years.  This gets you so far.  Soccer fans have spent over three decades insisting this sport will overtake America.  Things are bifurcated a lot, (Soap Operas make sense in a three network universe) and I imagine it doesn’t necessarily follow a faltering of a sport to rise somewhat.  But it doesn’t hurt.

In 1950 the three biggest and most followed sports in America were boxing, horse racing, and baseball.  Things are not as static as they seem to those who believe we live in a world of a hierarchy of a trio of sports in the foreground  on the sports’ page — baseball, football, basketball.