After a long 162 game season, one team has finally been crowned champion. The Kansas City Royals are the official 2015 World Series Champions! The Royals won the 7-game series 4-1 on Halloween night in the 12^th inning by a score of 7-2. This was the first World Series Championship for the Royals in nearly 30 years, finishing off with one of their greatest seasons ever. While the Royals secured another championship and spot in the record books of the MLB, baseball’s popularity continues to decline within America.

Professional baseball’s popularity is still high, as attendance and TV ratings were nothing out of the ordinary for the 2015 season. However, there has been an alarming decline in youth baseball across America as kids continue to play other sports over baseball. Young athletes are starting to choose sports like lacrosse, basketball, and soccer over America’s pastime and supporters of the sport are starting to worry if this will cause Major League Baseball to lose popularity in the future as these kids grow up. After all, most fans of baseball are people who have been exposed to the sport from a very young age. So how drastic has this decrease been? Though it seems like every kid you ask plays baseball, the decline in participation has been sharp from 2002 to 2013 (the last year where data is available). From 2002 to 2013, there was a 41% decrease in participation in baseball between kids aged 7 to 17 (http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-baseball-is-losing-children-1432136172 ). But what is causing this decline in participation?

One factor that seems to be rearing its ugly head is the specialization that sports often demand from kids, even at a young age. When playing a club sport for soccer, basketball, baseball, etc. the demands are often so great that kids are forced to quit all other sports just to manage the one they have chosen to play. These teams, even at ages as young as 9, practice two to three times a week and have multiple games a weekend, often in faraway cities. These kids’ parents just are not seeing the point in paying thousands of dollars to join these club sports only to have their kid choose to quit because they are sick of the sport after too much of it–a fate all too familiar for many young athletes.

Baseball’s seemingly endless season and “boring” aspects compared to the excitement of playing sports such as basketball, hockey, and soccer have also driven kids from the game. Lacrosse, also played in the spring, has stolen kids from baseball as a fast-pace, up-tempo sport with a lot of action for the players. Baseball, on the other hand, has been hit with the stigma of a lot of waiting with little to no action involved. While getting a hit and running the bases, fielding a ground ball, and throwing out a runner from the outfield is fun, there is a lot of standing around waiting for a pitch, as well as waiting for your turn in the dugout. For kids with short attention spans, this lack of action is a huge turn off to the sport as a whole.

While Major League Baseball can continue to reap the benefits of being America’s pastime for now, they may need to start worrying about their fan “base” in the near future. However, great postseason series’ and runs of magic like those of the Kansas City Royals should keep Major League’s Baseball very steady for the time being.