You might have seen that the All-Star Game ratings last week weren't good: The game drew an average of 8.71 million viewers, down 20 percent from last year, and the lowest number of viewers ever. Well, at least since it's been televised. In 1976, for example, the game drew an estimated 36 viewers. Baseball is dead! People would rather watch "House of Cards" on their iPads than watch baseball.

Except ... ignore the declining national TV ratings. In local markets, baseball remains hugely popular. Maury Brown of Forbes reported on the first-half ratings for Regional Sports Networks, and some of those ratings are very high. He writes:

Nine other teams are ranked second or third in their market for prime-time ratings. In other words: A lot of people are watching baseball. They just prefer watching their team. Yes, MLB officials would love it if Mike Trout was as popular as LeBron James on a national level -- akin to Ken Griffey Jr. challenging Michael Jordan for commercial time back in the 1990s -- but the days of baseball players as the most popular athletes in America are probably a thing of the past. That doesn't mean the sport isn't flourishing.

And at this moment, it's arguably flourishing the most in Kansas City, where back-to-back World Series appearances have energized a fan base that lay dormant for two decades. The Royals don't have the most raw viewers watching their games -- five teams in bigger markets draw more -- but they easily have the highest RSN rating at 13.26, well above No. 2 St. Louis' 8.14 rating. (The Blue Jays were not included in the study.) The Royals rank 11th in the majors in attendance, and though they're not drawing bigger crowds than last year, they're still up more 11,000 fans per game from 2013. They're so popular in the region that delegates from Kansas at the Republic National Convention proudly wore Royals T-shirts on Tuesday and claimed the Royals, even though they play in Missouri.

The Royals' long drought of losing understandably turned fans away from the team, but when they were winning back in the late '70s and early '80s, it was a great baseball market, as the Royals outdrew the Cardinals and annually ranked in the top four in the AL attendance despite playing in one of the league's smallest markets. That fervor has returned and Kansas City has a strong case of baseball fever.

One team that isn't drawing is the Indians, who rank 29th in the majors in attendance. This is a more complex story, as the Indians once had that long string of sellouts and led the AL in attendance in 1999 and 2000, but attendance has floundered the past decade or so even though the Indians never hit rock bottom like the Royals. That doesn't mean fans aren't getting behind the team, however, as the Indians have the eighth-best local RSN rating -- ahead of the Giants, Rangers and Cubs. I suspect their attendance figures will continue to climb throughout the summer as the team rolls along with the AL's best record.