It’s a testimony to the traditionalist bent that runs through Ricochet — and our shameless attempts to lure George Will over — that some of the most prolonged discussions in the site’s history have involved baseball (I recall at least one discussion of the designated hitter that resulted in casualties). Increasingly, however, we seem to be the outliers. We may still call the game “the national pastime,” but the title is largely vestigial. These days, baseball is more of a regional interest than a national obsession. From Jonathan Mahler in the New York Times:

On Tuesday night, the first game of the 2014 World Series drew just 12.2 million viewers to Fox, making it the lowest-rated Game 1 on record. Game 2 on Wednesday night fared somewhat better, with 12.9 million people tuning in.

It goes on:

For most of the last century, the start of baseball’s World Series — with its red, white and blue bunting and occasional ceremonial first pitch from the president — was always a major event. The opening game of the Fall Classic has provided some of the country’s most enduring sports memories, including Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder basket catch (1954), Sandy Koufax’s 15-strikeout performance (1963) and Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run (1988).

But this week, more people watched “NCIS: New Orleans” and “The Big Bang Theory,” and — for that matter — “The Walking Dead,” the cable show about zombies. The audience for “Sunday Night Football,” a regular season game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos, was almost twice that of Games 1 or 2. Even last Saturday night’s college football matchup — Florida State University versus Notre Dame — drew more viewers than either World Series game.

Perhaps the most compelling statement about baseball’s relative standing among American sports fans is this: Last summer’s World Cup match between the United States and Portugal drew 25 million viewers, roughly double that of the World Series opener.

OK, if you’ve witnessed an Obama first pitch, you know it’s probably not a net loss to the game to forego the presidential imprimatur. That’s form you wouldn’t accept from an eight-year-old girl. But that World Cup line? American exceptionialism is dead. (Further proof of this fact: my spell-check always flags the word “exceptionalism.” The bile that rises in that moment is biological proof of conservatism.)

Now, you can argue that television audiences for everything have fractured, which is true so far as it goes, but, as noted above, baseball’s biggest moment of the year isn’t even competitive with regular season fare from college or professional football. That may be partially attributable to the presence of a small-market team (the Kansas City Royals) in this year’s World Series, but the allure of the Royals’ Cinderella story (it’s been nearly 30 years since they’ve been in a championship series) ought to mitigate at least some of that. Still, there just aren’t many eyeballs to be found once the games get underway.

There’s a long-standing debate over what’s caused the decline in the game’s popularity. Was it the fallout from the steroids scandals (or at the least the fall-off in offensive production that occurred once the league cracked down on PEDs)? The fact that the American people no longer have the attention span for a game played at such a comparatively glacial pace? The fact that a 162-game regular season schedule dilutes the product?

Questions for the Ricochetti: is baseball’s second-tier status in American sports a cyclical phenomenon from which it will recover or is the game in the midst of a decline from which it will not return? Have you found your own interest in the game waning? And what — if anything — could arrest the slide?