It was possibly an exciting sport to see live back when the average concept of a "game" was wacking a hoop with a stick, but sometime between the invention of the phonograph and the invention of chatgpt there was a crucial moment when we realised, as a culture, that waiting five minutes for a guy to hit a ball with a stick was no longer a sufficient stimulant for our brains. America has largely moved on from baseball, it has actually moved on for quite a while; between basketball and the NFL, baseball as a sport hasn't made much cultural impact since at least the 90's.
Baseball a sport best experiences through its highlights, through fastforwarding through the noise of each game and into the glacial narratives being forged through its hundreds and thousands of games. The success of the movie Moneyball is a perfect example of this: The movie is about the process of Baseball far more often than its about Baseball itself, we see maybe two or three games throughout the runtime and only those games that emphasise the high and low points of the narrative. Baseball is a game best watched in posterity, seeing the rise and collapse of ballclubs and the statistics of years on end spelling out what an individual game cannot tell. In effect, it's a game almost perfectly desgined for the stats heads.
Henry Chadwick was the first true baseball fan. His work as a sports reporter popularised the Box Score for Baseball, which lets an entire game be read off of a single table, he invented several early metrics for hitters, and kept a close personal relationship with Albert Spalding. He's been in the baseball hall of fame for just about as long as its existed, which is especially notable as he's one of the few Englishmen honored in this hall. Chadwick was an extrmely early adopter of baseball, so early that he was more of a "bat and ball" journalist than of baseball specifically.