I think I am mainly in the "marketing failures" camp on this. Some of it is chicken-and-egg. Try listening to ESPN radio for several hours, and wait in vain for any meaningful baseball talk. They carry some games, in-season, but not the "talk" that I want. This is true any month of the year. ESPN has been basically co-opted by the NFL, NBA, NCAA (Football/Basketball) to push their respective products year-round (symbiotic relationships, no doubt). Baseball somehow isn't doing what it takes to get a share of that airtime, probably because it would involve giving up some money. ESPN will (probably correctly) claim they are responding to demand of their listenership; but again that is somewhat circular as with nearly zero attention paid to baseball not much interest gets drummed up. If baseball lags the NFL it's in part due to letting the NFL eat their lunch on things like this. On a recent drive I sat through over an hour of general sports talk on an ESPN radio show in which freaking Johnny Manziel's current freaking status with the freaking Cleveland Browns kept coming up for discussion. I know there are genuine pockets of interest for this, but I could not shake the feeling the topic was being pushed for higher purposes. And I want guys like Trout and Kershaw to be pushed that way too.