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Can baseball survive the Twitter generation?

We live in a fast-food, on-demand world.  We get pretty much anything and everything when we want it.  Burgers?  Pull up to the second window, please.  Music?  There's Spotify, Pandora, Youtube.    TV?  Who watches TV?  It's all about the DVR, Netflix, Hulu, and instantaneous streaming of virtually any show or movie you could ever want.  It's all on demand, all the time.

 Even the way we interact with people, and the different platforms available to us, are intended to be short-little snippets.  A status update here.  A tweet there.  An instagram post or a Snapchat.

 It's almost a miracle that something like baseball has survived.  All of the things listed above make our lives better and more enjoyable. They're also signs of productivity and prosperity.  The question here is whether baseball can survive the test of this era of instantaneous everything.

 It's not clear baseball is necessarily dying, but it's also not thriving, either. 

Viewership is on the decline, generally.  Unsurprisingly, game times have also inched up over the years, with games going well into 3 hours.  Attendance also dipped down below 70 million fans for the first time in 15 years.  This is a pattern and not just a blip.

 To combat this, Major League Baseball (and we may just refer to this entity as the ominous "baseball" here on out) is proposing a number of rule changes to make the games move quicker and more entertaining.  As you can expect, the die-hards had a meltdown.

 Let's rundown the most significant rule changes before we turn to why these might be good for the game:
  • The trade deadline:  there will only be one, actual, final trade deadline--July 31st.  No mater August trades, no more strange waiver trades in August.  
  • Mound visits:  mound visits will go down from six to five.
  • Home Run Derby:  $1 million dollar prize for the ultimate winner. 
  • Breaks between innings:  breaks will be now be 2:00 minutes for both local and nationally-broadcast games. 
  • And, starting in 2020, pitchers must face a minimum of three batters.
That last bullet is what's driving the most passionate baseball fans absolutely nuts.  Traditionalists?  Please sit down and take a breath.

 For the sake of the game, we must adjust.  We cannot cling to some idea of what the game was.  It's time to save it from extinction.  If baseball doesn't adapt, the fans will simply move on.  The product doesn't meet the requirements of its customers... and like any business, baseball must adapt.

 If anything, we should be happy that baseball is making an attempt to change.  If not, we'd accuse it of being stubborn and unwilling to adapt to survive.  I harbor some worries about whether the game can survive this new generation of in-demand everything... and not just retain existing fans but find a way to recruit new ones.

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