Sorry, Gil Scott-Heron, but in baseball at least the revolution was televised.
TV has transformed America's game more thoroughly than Babe Ruth or Alexander Cartwright. If not for the billions that owners now reap annually from national and local contracts, baseball would look a lot like it did in the gray and miserly 1950s.
Salaries would shrink. Interest would sink. The ballparks would stink.
Interestingly, the origin moment for that longstanding and wildly profitable relationship happened exactly 80 years ago in Philadelphia, at a brick factory in what is now the city's notorious Badlands.