Baseball
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relative to other spectator pastimes, the National League's set ticket price of 50 cents in 1876 was high, while the location of playing fields outside the inner city and the workweek daytime scheduling of games were also obstacles to a blue-collar audience. A century later, the situation was very different. With the rise in popularity of other team sports with much higher average ticket prices—football, basketball, and hockey—professional baseball had become among the most blue-collar-oriented of leading American spectator sports. In recent years, baseball's position compared to football in the United States has moved in contradictory directions. In 2008, Major League Baseball set a revenue record of $6.5 billion, matching the NFL's revenue for the first time in decades. On the other hand, the percentage of American sports fans polled who named baseball as their favorite sport was 16%, compared to pro football at 31%; in 1985, the respective figures were pro football 24%, baseball 23%. Because there are so many more major league
baseball games played, there is no comparison in overall attendance. In 2008, total attendance at major league games was the second-highest in history: 78.6 million, 0.7% off the record set the previous year. Attendance at games held under the Minor League Baseball umbrella also set a record in 2007, with 42.8 million; this figure does not include attendance at games of the several independent minor leagues. In Japan, where baseball is inarguably the leading spectator team sport, combined revenue for the twelve teams in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), the body that oversees both the Central and Pacific leagues, was estimated at $1 billion in 2007. Total NPB attendance for the year was approximately 20 million. While in the preceding two decades, MLB attendance grew by 50 percent and revenue nearly tripled, the comparable NPB figures were stagnant. There are concerns that MLB's growing interest in acquiring star Japanese players will hurt the game in their home country. In Cuba, where baseball is by every reckoning the national sport, the national team overshadows the city and provincial teams that play in the top-level domestic leagues. Revenue figures are not released for the country's amateur system; similarly, according to one official pronouncement, the sport's governing authority "has never taken into account attendance...because its greatest interest has always been the development of athletes". As of 2007, Little League Baseball oversees more than 7,000 children's baseball leagues with more than 2.2 million participants—2.1 million in the United States and 123,000 in other countries. Babe Ruth League teams have over 1 million