For all the glitz and glam of Citi Field–the New York Mets’ current stadium–I’ll never forget trekking out to storied Shea Stadium as a seven-year-old baseball newbie. It was at Shea that I watched my first ever Mets game and caught my first baseball. And it was at Shea that I forged my first lifelong connection with a sports team.  

Thinking back to that game, the sprout of my fandom, I am filled with mixed emotions, simultaneously grateful for my first introduction to professional sports and upset with how out of touch I’ve fallen with baseball recently. Yes, there were great moments, highlighted by the Mets’ appearance in the World Series in 2015. But over the last decade, like it did to many in my generation, America’s oldest pastime became somewhat of an afterthought for me–a fourth fiddle to football, basketball and soccer. 

During the pandemic though, something funny happened. Baseball made the unlikeliest of comebacks–both in my life, and in the lives of other Americans across the country. While NBA basketball sputtered ratings-wise, baseball surged, led by a huge jump in viewership with arguably the most valuable and sought-after demographic: young people. 

Graphic by Mia Goldberg

On a personal level, baseball’s recovery makes little sense. Teams this year are playing in empty stadiums without any fans, which theoretically should have caused huge problems. Live audiences are more important to baseball than arguably any other sport, and going to a baseball game is as much about the atmosphere and the ball-game grub as it is about the home runs and the strikeouts.

Watching baseball on TV was always about immersing myself in that same experience vicariously through the fans on my screen. It was about getting to see fans compete aggressively with one another for foul balls, watching them perform the wave in near-unison when they–like me–got a little antsy, and standing up and cheering with my TV compadres when a run was scored or a great catch was made. That baseball has persisted in spite of the lack of crowds is incredibly unlikely and even more exciting.

Perhaps most importantly, the pandemic forced the MLB to make the long overdue decision to dramatically shorten its season. It’s hard to invest too deeply in one game out of a 162-game slugfest, but it’s a lot easier to care when teams’ schedules are compressed into a neat two-month package. The pandemic also caused the MLB to expand its playoffs to sixteen teams, similar to the NBA and NHL. With so many spots, no team was truly ever out of the playoff picture–even my lowly Mets, who limped towards the finish line, were eliminated just a few days before the end of the regular season.

Baseball has also lucked out, aided by the changes in lifestyle resulting from COVID-19. For years, the prime reason for baseball’s steady decline had been attributed to structural challenges the game imposes on viewers. America’s oldest pastime wasn’t prepared for the technological innovations of the present, and the resulting shorter attention spans that are incompatible with baseball’s slow-moving nature. But with less to do and fewer people to see, people have adjusted their attention spans, so more folks are likely to exhibit the patience to sit through nine innings of baseball.

For the MLB, the uptick in viewership is not guaranteed to hold steady. And when life returns to normal, baseball risks snapping right back to its past failures. But the pandemic–if nothing else–has shown that baseball still has a path to prominence and reinvigoration. Yes, boredom helped baseball. But so did the other changes: the shortened season, the bigger playoff picture, and the abbreviated double headers. Baseball had become too predictable. This year has offered a promising alternative. An alternative that, should the MLB choose to embrace it, could offer them a path to recapturing me and the millions of other young fans around the country and world who once called baseball their favorite sport.