It was in the shadows of baseball that MLS concluded its third season, and it is in the shadows of the baseball postseason that MLS enters the playoffs. It was said that MLS’s arrival in 1996 provided a golden opportunity for soccer to break baseball’s monopoly on the summer sports dollar. Major League Baseball was ailing, it was said. The game was too slow, the players too spoiled, and the fans too old. Soccer fit neatly into a two-hour package. The players were friendly, and the fans were young. Three seasons later, baseball has reaffirmed itself as the National Pastime. Sellout crowds greeted Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, at home and on the road. Huge crowds followed the National League wild-card race. MLS should be so lucky. There was actually a record chase, but you would never have known by the lack of attention to Stern John’s late chase for Roy Lassiter’s single-season scoring records. The only team that drew really well late in the year was New England, which had the worst record in MLS. Soccer still fits into a two-hour package, great for TV but not so great if it means we go to the shootout instead of overtime after 90 minutes. Soccer players are the friendliest bunch of American pro athletes, but the performance, off the field, of so many players at France ’98 certainly has tarnished their image. Probably the biggest fallacy in MLS’s bid to become bigtime was the notion that the millions of young participants would become fans. They haven’t, and MLS has been left with an audience that, though younger on the whole than baseball’s, is still too small to be sustainable. If soccer fans don’t start coming out for playoff or record chases like baseball fans do, MLS won’t survive long into the 21st century.