No, the strike in 1994-95 is what hurt baseball the most. Sosa and McGwire (and generally the uptick in home runs and offense) helped to revive baseball after the strike.
If there had been a World Series that year, it would have been one for the ages. It would have been Yankees/Expos, of course.
The Expos were really good that year too. I wonder if their success that year would have made it less likely that the team moved to Washington in the future?
The strike was just one of many things that killed the Expos. Not only were they severely low on cash (I think this was a problem even before the strike), they also had to contend with that ass-ugly stadium. Trust me on this one. I've been there. Stade Olympique looks OK from the outside, but inside, it's a concrete shit hole. Players all hated it, too. And the premier of Quebec wouldn't authorize any public funding for a new ballpark - the Expos could certainly never have afforded it on their own - but here comes DC: Not only were they willing to build the Nats a new ballpark, they also had an OLD one they could use in the meantime.
Denver has NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB. All are extremely popular, and while the Rockies don't sell out every game, they pull 30k fans for most games.
Giants are very popular in the Bay Area. Maybe not as much as the Warriors/49ers, but they are much more popular than the A's.
We need a Starfleet captain who is obsessed with WWE-style professional wrestling. Or jai alai. Jai alai would be cool. Kor
Sisko appears to have an interest in history; he's interested in a sport that seems to have faded out a few centuries ago; he's very interested in the African-American experience (and suffering) of the 17th to 21st centuries when most other Trek suggests such discrimination is centuries gone (side reference, in UFO it's said that racial discrimination died out after some major problems in the 1970s. If only...)
It occurs to me that Take Me Out to the Holosuite wouldn't have worked if they had used another sport for the competition. A lot of the humor is derived from baseball's rather esoteric rules. In comparison, basketball and soccer are rather simple to follow. And American football is just too violent. No way could you have coed teams unless they played touch. The only other sport that could have worked in the story might be cricket which is similarly mystifying to those who don't know how it's played.
I live in the Chicago suburbs. This is the Cubs' town, followed by the Bears. The proof is the 5+ million who came out to watch the 2016 victory parade.