How did bowling survive but baseball didn't?

Bowling is kind of a clutch sport for a Federation starship, if you think about it.
Bowling alleys are long and narrow, which means you can fit one in by shaving a little off a lot of rooms instead of a lot off a few rooms. They're infinitely scalable, too; you can have a 2-lane alley, or a 200-lane alley, whatever fills your space. You can even stack them; if you've got two three-lane-wide spaces on adjacent decks, just add a staircase.
Bowling accomodates a wide range of player counts; a lane might be one guy whose friends are all on-shift, trying to nail a perfect game, or it might be a scheduled five-member team competing against four other teams. There's not a lot of "big room" sports that take up less space per player than bowling. Especially in the future, where the machinery is probably one micro-repulsor emitter in the ball return and a tiny antigrav in each pin.
Bowling is easy to teach: even aliens who've never heard of it can pretty easily pick up "roll this ball across that floor to hit those sticks".
Somewhat relatedly, bowling is very social; if you're on a team, you're not actually playing n-1 shares of the time, so you can chat with your teammates, other players, etc. Good for both crew bonding, and for diplomacy.
- Damn good sales pitch, Ferengi.
- One objection: bowling is not a good game for socializing. I go to a fair number of networking events for my job, and the challenge in bowling is that you can't have any conversation of substance before it's your turn again. You're constantly getting interrupted and then trying to restart conversations.

In TOS they didn’t have holodecks.
A space ship might fit bowling lanes but not a whole baseball field.
- Also, bowling was waaaay more popular at the time TOS was airing than it is today
- At least a batting cage

"Fucking Gary. That creep can roll, man."
- "You said it man, nobody fucks with the Gary."
- You don't fuck with the Gary.
- Neelix is a better candidate for The Jesus since he exposed himself to a two year old.

Bowling is fun
- So is baseball.
  
  This isn't facebook, please don't willfully spread disinformation.
  
  Every person playing the game baseball is dedicated to stopping everyone else from doing anything at all. The entire game is based on waiting around or preventing any form of progress. It is excruciatingly frustrating and boring.
  
  False

Hear me out. They don't have fields because they play outside. Just crank up the artificial gravity on the hull, suit up, and head out an airlock. It's one of the reasons for the saucer section.
- I love the idea, but according to DS9, almost no one knows what baseball is.
  
  Baseball is not really a thing outside of the US and Japan. So why would it be a thing outside of Earth?
  And, at least in Europe, there are way more people that know at least the basics of bowling than baseball, and similar games have been played everywhere since time immemorial. Couple that with the relatively small playing field, without the need for too much vertical space, it's a significant more attractive choice to have on a spaceship.
  
  That's because Khan took the ball home with him in a snit.
- I thought according to SNW they don't even need space suits outside on the hull… 🙃

Bowling is common worldwide, baseball isn't.
- And any person can play it, even people who can't walk, bowling is the most diverse physical sport out there, no special skills required, just roll the ball, you can even choose weight to be comfortable to you

Presumably humanity spent a lot of time in bunkers prior to first contact, and there's not enough space for baseball but there's plenty of space for bowling

Wait, who says baseball didn't survive? DS9 had a baseball game, against the Vulcans nonetheless iirc, clearly they still know the game is and have teams that play it. Am I missing something?
- DS9 said baseball didn't survive. Living holodeck version of Buck Bokai said as much to Sisko:
  BUCK: Well, that was baseball's epitaph, wasn't it. Nobody seemed to have time for us anymore. I could've played five more years if they hadn't killed the game.
  SISKO: You were the best that ever played. I know. I've played with them all. I've got work to do.
  BUCK: Hey, Ben. It really meant a lot to me, how much you cared. That day we won that world series, there were only three hundred people in the stands.
  From If Wishes Were Horses.
  
  Hmm, I guess I have forgotten the exact dialog, as it was over 10 years ago since I watched that. I guess the implication is that it didn't survive as a professional competitive sport? Because there definitely are teams that play it at least casually - and I went to check, it was indeed a Vulcan baseball team that challenged Sisco https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Logicians - so I'd argue it still has survived to some degree, no?
  
  301 in my version - Ben

Bowling and Baseball we're both killed by Parchesi Squares.

I'm sure you could do field sports in the Holodeck, but it wouldn't surprise me if fully interior sports like bowling or hockey became significantly more popular once human civilization started regularly spending time in space stations and ships.
- This was also before they had holodecks, so they would have had to have another form of recreation. That was something the crew of the NX-01 kind of struggled with, so it would make sense the next Enterprise would have accomodations

It's the Cetaceans. Even though their flippers can't fit in the holes, they refuse to work on a starship without a working bowling ally. With proper pin setters too, non of those string pins.
- That's on the D. This is the A, which did not have accommodations for cetaceans.

Because bowling is fun and accessible for everyone whereas baseball is 15 minutes of action spread over 3 hours for chemically enhanced freaks where the biggest fans are mostly in it for the statistics?

Can't believe they chose a bowling alley and not a wave pool.
- They should put some saunas in as part of the cooling system. A lil treat for working in engineering.