from Mike Shropshire's Seasons in Hell:
There's another theory, and this one is entirely mine, as to why baseball drifted from the mainstream of sports-fan attention. I blame Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam. Nobody can deny that with the advent of the Seventies, the American League had ceased to produce the box-office stars. The Mantles and the Berras were retiring and little of replacement value was coming along. Why? The leading teenage athletes were mostly turning to football and basketball. The baseball signing bonus was eschewed in favor of the college athletic scholarship and the draft deferment that came with it.
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