There are only a couple of countries where baseball is played seriously: Dominican Republic, parts of Venezuela, Nicaragua and some of northern Mexico. In Puerto Rico, the games often get less than 300 spectators.
Puerto Rico: #1 sport has always been politics, followed by basketball. Like in many urban areas of Latin America, basketball can be played indoors or in small outdoor venues. Soccer takes more space, and baseball the same.
US Football has no hold in Latin America. I saw figures that the attendance at the NFL games in Mexico and PR was mostly college grads who went to school in the US.
Everywhere else, it's soccer. While Argentina has polo and rugby and some decent tennis players, those are not mass appeal sports even there.
Kids play soccer, even if it is kicking the ball on the street. They go to school and company team games, and go to professional games. Some big cities have four or five teams, representing different districts or socioeconomic levels, sort of like political parties. Buenos Aires has, depending on how snobby you are, 5 "big" teams or 7 if you count the two smaller upstarts in the suburbs of that city of 17,000,000 in the metro.
When I was on the board of a team in Quito, we had 4 other local teams plus the ones from other cities to play against.
I bring out the profusion of teams as it is something that allows each part of the city as well as the university grads, the blue collar workers, the different parts of a big city to have their own team and one could see them play their rival almost every week, all year round. It was always fun to hop on the bus to the stadium Sunday morning in Quito and see two games, 4 teams, and have a beer or four. I could hang with my broadcast crew, visit the locker rooms and just sit and watch with friends and discuss the economy, politics, and anything else, mostly politically incorrect, that we wanted.
The whole culture involves football. Babies are dressed in team colors. There are victory parties in the neighborhoods for winning teams, wakes for losing. In both cases, copious volumes of rum and aguardiente were consumed. Heck, my stations even had a team that played other stations. Since we broadcast sports, we got some ringers on our team who played really well... but my payback (I was goalie) was geting kicked in the legs, tummy, ribs, the unmentionables and the face by the players of our competitors who were, we found out, incentivized to make my amateur soccer career unpleasant. As I said, it's all about soccer... the station beats you in ratings, but you get back at the staff and owner by playing rough soccer! And then we all go and get some beer....
