A recent analysis of baseball’s popularity by Gary Gillette concluded that the game is "not nearly as popular now as it once was." Gary Gillette is the co-chair of SABR’s Business of Baseball committee and editor of the 2006 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, making this piece especially credible.

So how do you explain a Gallup News Service release four months earlier that proclaimed "nearly half of Americans are baseball fans," which is about the same proportion of baseball fans that Gallup found in 1993?

Gary Gillette drew his conclusions from a review of polls, television ratings, attendance and revenue figures, press coverage and such. Although impressive and important to understanding baseball’s position among competing sport products, most of this evidence is circumstantial. Only the opinion polls have scientific validity, as they are quasi-experimental findings from large randomly chosen samples of telephone households, tracked over multiple occasions, and with known error ranges that make the polls projectable to the U.S. population.