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I almost never bother to try to forecast the outcome of an election. After all, we shall all know soon enough. High-tech California, for instance, should be done counting its votes by early December.

So, rather than attempt to offer insights into the same thing everybody else is talking about, I’m going to indulge myself. The World Series has been on TV and that got me thinking about the history of major league baseball.

Baseball is a traditionalist sport. When Freddie Freeman of the Los Angeles Dodgers hit a last-out, come-from-behind, game-winning home run in the first game of the 2024 World Series to almost exactly match Kirk Gibson’s heroics in a near identical moment in the 1988 World Series, announcer Joe Davis consciously echoed the late, great announcer Vin Scully’s call of “She…is gone!” and then immediately explained the historical context: “Gibby, meet Freddie!”

What’s changed in 36 years? There’s now more posing (with Freeman holding up his bat and saluting his father like a trailer highlight from Gladiator II) and more multimedia razzmatazz at Dodger Stadium with flashing lights and Randy Newman’s 1983 theme song “I Love L.A.” starting up as the slugger rounded first base.

But, in the big picture, not much has changed and baseball remains baseball.

Big league baseball has been a highly standardized product for a very long time—for example, from 1901 to 1960, there were sixteen major league teams each playing 154-game seasons, and 162-game seasons since then. So its statistics are famously comprehensible and appealing to Aspergery-type intellects.

In contrast, the game of professional football has changed so much that it’s fairly pointless to attempt to compare the passing statistics of Patrick Mahomes and Johnny Unitas. And college football’s sample sizes are too small for reliable statistical analysis.

Yet it can be demonstrated with a fair degree of confidence that Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees enjoyed in 2024 the best season any ballplayer has had as a batter since Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle in the mid-1950s, outside of the turn-of-the-century years when there was no testing for performance-enhancing drugs. (On the other hand, I can say with some assurance on Tuesday morning, with the Dodgers up three wins to none over the Yankees, that more than a few hitters have enjoyed better postseasons than Judge has…so far.)

Recently, during the George Floyd racial reckoning, the baseball powers-that-be announced that pre–Jackie Robinson Negro League statistics would count as major league statistics. While it’s undeniable that Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, and the like were among the greatest baseball players ever—after all, their major league successors such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Frank Robinson (although fewer black pitchers) were demonstrably great—the inclusion of Negro Leagues stats, such as they are, undermines the neurodivergent appeal of the completeness of big league stats.

We are still missing the box scores of 20+ percent of Negro Leagues games, and Negro Leagues schedules were constantly being disrupted by teams taking the opportunity to abandon their league to barnstorm on the West Coast or to compete in the North Dakota semipro championships. Reading about Josh Gibson (1911–1947), who may well have been the greatest catcher ever, is like reading about Achilles: We hear about his greatest hits, such as his 500-foot home runs, but the kind of statistical analysis that allows us to meticulously compare 1950s catchers like Roy Campanella vs. Yogi Berra remains impossible.

This is not to say that Gibson of the Negro Leagues was not as good as Berra, Campanella, or Johnny Bench of the major leagues, just that Gibson’s data is inherently not as appealing to the more autistic fans.

Baseball emerged in the Victorian northern United States as a descendant of British ball-and-bat games like rounders, with the two main variants spreading west out of New York City and Boston. During the Civil War, Union army troops had to choose which sets of rules they preferred to play by, and Midwesterners picked New York’s over Boston’s. After the Civil War, the combination of national rules and railroads allowed professional baseball to develop from 1869 onward.

Modern big league baseball can reasonably be dated to the founding of the American League in 1901 to compete with the National League. In the 1890s, when it was the sole major league, the National League had allowed itself to become dominated by brawling, drunken big-city Irishmen. So in 1901, entrepreneur Ban Johnson announced the American League as a more family-friendly variant aimed at the English and German parts of the country. The American League has been the more dominant division ever since, falling behind mostly when the National League took the lead in breaking the color line from 1947 onward.

A basic comparison is average attendance per major league game:

During the low-scoring deadball era of the first two decades of the 20th century, attendance shot upward during the great pennant races of 1908 (the year of Merkle’s Boner, a term I attempted, unsuccessfully, to revive in 2015 to denote German chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to invite in a million military-age Muslim men) but then declined during the formation of the rival Federal League in 1914–1915.

Crowds shrank in the war year of 1918, but then rose in 1919 (+93 percent) and 1920 (+26 percent) when the boys returned home from the Western Front and Babe Ruth invented home run hitting. The revelation late in the 1920 season that the Chicago “Black” Sox had thrown the 1919 World Series depressed the more sensitive fan (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 The Great Gatsby is centered on the Black Sox scandal), but Ruth’s revelation that swinging for the fences paid off kept baseball on an upward trajectory until the Depression.

Baseball’s big breakthrough came in 1945–1948 when a combination of the soldiers coming home from winning the Big One and integration from 1947 onward more than doubled average attendance. By several metrics of human happiness, 1946 was the best year in American history, with baseball attendance up 69 percent. Further, movie tickets sold reached an all-time high that year, as did weddings. For instance, my parents were married on Saturday, June 15, 1946, which may well have been the busiest day ever for marriages.

Weirdly, not much happened to increase baseball attendance during the third quarter of the 20th century. From a nostalgic perspective, it seems like a good era, but its numbers are ho-hum. My guess is that other sports like football, basketball, and ice hockey emerged to break baseball’s monopoly on the national attention.

But then the superb 1975 World Series between Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine of Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Johnny Bench versus Boston’s Red Sox of Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, and Jim Rice reminded sports fans of how good baseball could be, launching almost two decades of growth in per-game attendance. Attendance grew steadily from the later 1970s to the early 1990s, before skyrocketing in 1993–94.

Ballplayers appear to have discovered steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs around 1993–94. I can recall a high school friend who had become a successful player’s agent explaining to me around then that Jose Canseco (whose grand slam in the first game of the 1988 World Series set up Gibson’s winning two-run homer) was “the Typhoid Mary of steroids,” as Canseco’s autobiography confirmed.

Fans loved steroids but hated the late 1994 strike, with attendance per game dropping from a huge 30k in 1994 to 25k in 1995. It took until 2007 for attendance to exceed the 1994 apogee.

Crowd sizes have been fairly flat ever since, with 2024 averaging a little under 30k as franchises have concentrated upon squeezing more money per capita out of ticket buyers.

Baseball tends to be a big-city but red-state game, so it only has a few obvious expansion prospects left, such as Nashville, Charlotte, and Austin, with Portland appearing to have self-destructed in this decade.