Hi all, I'm new to this board and I love it -- easily one of the more interesting places on the internet in my opinion.
I thought I'd chime in on what if the Yankees never won a World Series, and how baseball and American sports would be different in some ways and similar in others to our current timeline.
The Yankees success with Babe Ruth injected millions of dollars into a team that was for the first thirty years of its existence a third rate team at best. Of the three teams in New York, the Giants were by far the most successful and the richest until Ruth came to the Yankees, of course. Had Ruth never come to the Yankees, they never would have been able to sign basically any great amateur player they wanted, bolstering their incredible farm system. Bear in mind, there was no proper "minor leagues" until the 1950s, and major league teams basically bought great players from lesser professional leagues for massive sums of money in some cases. They also would never have had their amazing scouting system that allowed them to sign Mickey Mantle from an unknown league in Texas for almost nothing, or Joe Dimaggio from the San Francisco Seals for a ton of money at the time.
Without the Yankees becoming a dynasty, the Giants would have certainly remained in New York, as well as the Dodgers. I don't think they would have folded, but they would have perhaps moved to the West Coast in the late 40s/early 50s.
Baseball would never have been as popular as it was back then and as it is today. Babe Ruth doing his thing in the media capital of the universe helped baseball and the Yankees more than words can describe, so perhaps football would become more popular earlier than it did if he never played in New York.