This sobering stat about the popularity of baseball has been making the rounds on Thursday after it was posted by Sam Walker, the global sports editor at The Wall Street Journal.

Kids 6-17 made up 4.6% of World Series audience. For NBA conf. finals it was 9.4%, NHL conf. finals 9%, Premier League soccer on NBC 11% — Sam Walker (@SamWalkers) October 31, 2013

There are two ways to look at this:

1. By focusing on later World Series start times and failing to do anything about the glacial pace of games, baseball has mortgaged its future amongst young fans who are more interested in iPads, Twitter, Facebook and fast-paced sports than a game where pitchers take 10 seconds to read signs while a batter calls time to readjust his batting gloves for the 97th time. Baseball is too slow for the current generation.

2. Too slow? Have you seen a soccer game? It makes baseball look like jai alai. Look, the numbers are damning and certainly reason for concern in the MLB offices. But the stat obscures a major point: There are still more kids watching baseball than any of those other sports. Given the average of 14.1 million World Series viewers, that 4.6% equates to roughly 648,600 kids watching baseball. That’s 248,600 more children watching the World Series than the total audience of the average Premiere League game on NBC. With an average of 400,000 viewers for English soccer on the NBC networks, the 11% comes out to 44,000 kids. It’s apples and oranges. The numbers for basketball (approximately 470,000 kids) and hockey (roughly 238,500 child viewers) are better than soccer, but still less than the number of kids who watched the World Series.

So the other way to look at it: Baseball still is popular among the younger set, but has its numbers skewed older by the baby boomers who grew up with baseball as their national pastime. It’s a sign that MLB needs to evaluate its game, but no reason to panic. Yet.