On the face of it, it’s amazing the $6.1 billion that Major League Baseball took in last year is within spitting distance of the NFL’s 2007 revenue of $6.3 billion. The Super Bowl broke TV ratings records once again in 2008, drawing nearly 100 million viewers, while only 17 million bothered to tune in to the 2007 World Series. But baseball has found increasingly inventive ways to ramp up revenue — from counterintuitively reducing the number of seats in stadiums to selling streaming video of baseball games online — hitting record high revenues for five consecutive years.

Baseball remains an especially local, live form of entertainment — an aspect some analysts trace to its historical roots, which predate national markets and TV by a half-century. Unlike the NFL, which takes in more than two-thirds of revenue from national TV, baseball’s national broadcasts generate less than 20 percent of overall sales ($935 million in 2006). The lion’s share comes from revenue at its ballparks and via local broadcasts.

It’s at the local level — soaring sales of higher-priced tickets, concessions, and advertising at new theme-park style stadiums — that MLB is hitting some of its biggest home runs.