You might have heard this before: Baseball is dying.
It's not. The Angels' Shohei Ohtani might be the world's most intriguing athlete. Baseball games offer top-rated prime-time programming in just about every city in the major leagues. The intensity of this month's World Baseball Classic, and the introduction of new rules designed to showcase athleticism and pick up the pace, should stir even more interest. And a dying industry does not generate record revenues, as Major League Baseball did last year.
Over the last few weeks, you might have heard "baseball is dying" cries from an unlikely source: the owners of several major league teams, who have called MLB "an industry in crisis" in which "the vast majority of players, agents and clubs dislike baseball's economic system." One owner suggested his team had not spent on free agents last winter because his up-and-coming team had "overperformed" last summer.
