But these diagnoses expose some misunderstandings about baseball’s popularity.

There’s no disputing that fact that football championship-game viewership dwarfs baseball’s championship-series viewership. But “the World Series vs. the Super Bowl” actually stopped being a contest decades ago. Since January 14, 1968, when the Green Bay Packers beat the Oakland Raiders before an estimated TV audience of over 39 million, the Super Bowl has consistently drawn more viewers. The most-watched World Series game ever was Game Seven of the 1986 series between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox, which was seen by around 38.9 million viewers. So even when baseball was supposedly at the forefront of the national conversation, football was already outperforming it in TV ratings. (It’s important to note, however, that ratings for the first four games of the Series are up 15 percent from last year and are the highest for a World Series in four years. Perhaps just as importantly, the ratings are up 28 percent among advertisers’ favorite demographic, the 18-49 age group.)

And regarding the “national conversation” and the “broader cultural trends” of modern America, what is meant by culture, and how is baseball lacking? Does culture include film? Has there been a football-related movie in the past few years that has had as much cultural impact as Moneyball or the story of Jackie Robinson’s first year in the major leagues, 42? Are books a part of culture? Far more books on baseball are published every year than any other sport. According to Forbes, Game Three of this year’s World Series was primetime TV's most talked about show on Twitter by a lot; it stunned fans with the first ever game-ending interference call and inspired more than 480,000 tweets.

But what has happened to baseball in recent years, according to Mahler, “has a lot to do with the broader cultural trends that have helped shape modern America.” Expansion, for instance: More franchises have meant more ticket sales and more TV viewers, Mahler says, but “a lot of teams wound up in cities without deep roots in the game.”

Mahler quotes Bob Costas as saying,

Expansion also helped insure that baseball would become a largely regional sport. Economically, this has been great. Local TV deals are where the money is … The downside is that only a handful of franchises can claim any sort of national profile. If Tampa Bay played Cincinnati in the World Series, I don’t care if the series goes seven games and every game goes into extra innings, baseball is screwed.

(Because, presumably, Tampa Bay and Cincinnati don’t command large national audiences.)

Is baseball’s comparative irrelevance really the result of the MLB putting teams in cities “without deep roots in the game”? It’s debatable. What cities does Mahler mean? Major League Baseball’s expansions in California and Texas—two states that, between them, are home to seven franchises, nearly a quarter of MLB teams—were all in cities where the Pacific Coast League and Texas League flourished. Likewise, new teams in Florida and Arizona were also homes of a strong minor-league tradition, to say nothing of the home of major-league spring training leagues for decades. When the Braves went from Milwaukee to Atlanta, their new home was a city that had been one of the most venerated in the old Southern League, not to mention the Negro Leagues as well. In fact, every city that the major leagues have moved into since 1960, whether by expansion or relocation, has strong roots in professional baseball.