While the Bears fend for scraps, the Red Bulls averaged 18,796 fans for their first 12 home games this season — and that does not include the sellout for the M.L.S. All-Star Game and other exhibition matches.

Although the Newark-Harrison story is an extreme and somewhat unusual case, it reflects an urban cultural shift on which soccer hopes to capitalize as an emergent and faster-paced sport in 21st-century America. Still enormously popular in many markets, baseball has lost traction with young people, especially African-Americans, with a 26 percent decline in youth participation between 2000 and 2009, according to the National Sporting Goods Association.

“In terms of drawing people, the soccer stadium in Harrison has been a success,” said Rick Cerone, a former Yankees catcher and the Bears’ original owner, who grew up in Newark and lobbied county and city politicians for the return of the Bears, a popular Yankees farm team more than half a century ago.

He acknowledged that misjudgments might have been made about the Newark of then and now.

“Probably the best thing to do would have been a soccer stadium or maybe coordinate one stadium that could have been used for both,” Cerone said. “But, you know, it’s easy to look back.”

According to Cerone, the original plan for the baseball revival included a 12,000-seat soccer stadium in the area of Riverbank Park in the Ironbound. But neighborhood opposition to the complex mounted, and Cerone preferred the less-congested and more easily accessible site along McCarter Highway where the ballpark was built.

On the subject of a clear vision for which sport Newark’s population was best suited to support, Jim Hague, a longtime Newark-area sportswriter and the Bears’ publicist and stadium announcer until this season, said: “No one could see the forest through the trees. If they had built a soccer stadium in Newark, it would have been a huge success. But you also have to remember that at that time M.L.S. had grand glories of selling out bigger stadiums.”

The league has since opted for smaller, soccer-specific arenas that have fueled hopes for sustained growth and long-term profitability. Meanwhile, the baseball project in Newark went forward with the blessing of Sharpe James, then the city’s mayor.