Since the 1960s, professional football has supplanted baseball as our nation’s favorite sport—generating higher revenue and better television ratings. And, as the past few weeks have demonstrated, college basketball has captured the attention and diminished the productivity of the American workforce in ways baseball does not. But let’s not confuse popularity with superiority.

Major League Baseball (MLB), the oldest spectator team sport in the nation, has become the most affordable and least exploitative one—and its labor relations are remarkably harmonious, too. Compared to the dysfunction, scandal, and discontent commonplace in other professional sport, baseball is looking better than ever.

Let’s start with cost: A family with a middle-class income can attend a baseball game without straining its budget but has to think hard before splurging for an afternoon or evening spent inside an NFL stadium or an NBA or NHL arena. In 2011, the average price of an MLB ticket was about $27, compared to over $48 for a pro basketball game, $57 for a hockey match, and a whopping $113 for one ticket to a gridiron bruise-a-thon.

Of course, it’s a lot more expensive to buy your way into Yankee Stadium than into, say, PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who have not had a winning season in 20 years. But victory doesn’t always lead to overcharging the customers. After capturing the World Series in 2010, the following year, the San Francisco Giants raised the average price of a ticket to just $25. This bought you a seat in perhaps the most beautiful stadium in North America, where, from the upper-deck, you look out on San Francisco Bay and the Oakland hills beyond. Next fall, that same amount will buy you just a beer and a serving of nachos at MetLife Stadium, the home of the New York Giants, located in the featureless flatland adjoining the New Jersey Turnpike. Alas, even the worst seat to watch the 2012 Super Bowl winners there will run you over $100.

In addition, pro baseball, which sold more than 73 million tickets last year, has also become more internally competitive, despite wide spending disparities between rich teams like the Yankees and the relatively impoverished Pirates. Pittsburgh actually led their division halfway through the summer, before the young squad endured an epic collapse. And last year, the Tampa Bay Rays, one of the poorest teams in the Majors, squeezed into the playoffs with a stunning, almost unprecedented comeback on the very last day of the season. The scrappy Rays rallied from seven runs behind in the eighth inning to defeat the mighty Yanks, whose annual payroll is five times larger than theirs.