DOES BASEBALL MATTER?

Susan Jacoby, Why Baseball Matters (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018):

     I told a young friend--a fantasy baseball enthusiast who rarely attends games or watches them on television--that I was planning to write a short book about the challenges facing baseball, as a game and a business, in an era of fragmented attention spans and unprecedented competition for fans' attention among all sports. [] My concerns about the future of baseball--a $10 billion sport enjoying an unprecedented era of financial success and labor peace---are not based on misplaced nostalgia for a 'pure' game that never existed. They are based on the dissonance between a game that demands and depends on concentration, time, and memory and a twenty-first-century culture that routinely disrupts all three with its vast menu of digital distractions.

Id. at xv.