How the N.B.A. and the M.L.B. Shattered America’s Sports Culture

Opinion|$4,785. That’s How Much It Costs to Be a Sports Fan Now.

I was at Fenway Park with my dad when the Boston Red Sox legend David Ortiz hit the game-tying grand slam in Game 2 of the 2013 American League Championship Series. Months earlier, after the Boston Marathon bombing, Mr. Ortiz had stood on the field and said, “This is our city,” adding an expletive.

That night in October when the grand slam cleared the fence, I hugged strangers. Grown men were on the verge of tears. Fenway shook like it might collapse from the sound. You didn’t need to understand the score to understand the moment. It didn’t matter who you were. Everyone understood what it meant. A few weeks later, the Red Sox won the World Series — and it felt like Boston had come all the way back.

For most of my life, sports was one of the most accessible forms of entertainment in America. You turned on the TV, flipped to the game and cheered or booed — with your family, your neighborhood, your city. Being a fan was simple. It was community.

This community is dying, because some of its shared moments are disappearing. Take the N.B.A. playoffs. Wanted to watch the Denver Nuggets? You needed to shell out at least $8.99 a month for NBA TV — unless you happened to live in Denver, in which case you had to spend an additional $20 a month for a regional basketball streaming subscription.

It’s not just basketball. I subscribe to nearly every service there is with live sports — YouTube TV, MLB.TV, NBA League Pass, NFL Sunday Ticket, Peacock, Apple TV+, Max, Amazon Prime, Paramount — for $2,634 a year. But to watch the Boston Red Sox play the New York Yankees earlier this month, I would have had to fork over an additional $19.99 a month for some obscure baseball-focused service that has that slice of one of the most iconic rivalries in America’s national pastime.

For decades, our national sports leagues — the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League — operated more like civic institutions. These organizations may have always chased the mighty dollar, but they also wanted their sports to last. And as such, they cared about strengthening such powerful intangibles as local pride, generational fandom and public ritual. Tradition was good business. Community built loyalty. Loyalty built value.