Competitive Walking was the most popular spectator sport in America before baseball.

Yes, it's this comment that makes this bold claim.

The person making the comment has linked to this article in the washington post, but the washington post has been criticized for peddling bs news before, which makes me somewhat suspicious regarding the veracity of its articles.(Yes, I know it's cracked.com which is doing the criticizing, but I'm still gonna take washington post articles with a grain of salt unless I get verification elsewhere)

I'll also add the badhistory from the washington post article:

But just a decade later, pedestrianism was dead. By then, charges of race fixing and doping had diluted fan interest. During one race in 1876, the famous pedestrian Edward Payson Weston was caught chewing coca leaves — a practice that was considered unsportsmanlike, if not outright cheating.

Meanwhile, baseball was on the rise. The National League, founded as a ragtag enterprise in 1876, became a stable, profitable business after team owners imposed a $2,500 salary cap in 1885. Of the eight clubs in the league in 1890, only one, the Cleveland Spiders, no longer exists. The other seven clubs were, and still are, the Braves, Cubs, Dodgers, Giants, Phillies, Pirates and Reds. Fans who once had flocked to six-day races instead filled spacious new wooden ballparks.

So, after doing some fact-checking on Wikipedia, I realized that the article on competitive walking (which Wikipedia calls racewalking) doesn't mention the word "baseball" at all(a quick ctrl f search helps). In fact, one of the citations there links to this article on npr, which I'll use to refute the badhistory quoted.

See, the article on washington post does not even care to mention the rise of bicycling as a popular sport, which is a pretty egregious omission, given that bicycling was the actual reason for the decline in the popularity of competitive walking. Here, let me quote npr for you:

On how bicycles took over pedestrianism as the popular spectator sport

In 1885, an Englishman named John Starley invented what is called the safety bicycle. Before the safety bicycle, bicycles were the penny farthings — with the ginormous front wheel and the tiny little back wheel. And the penny farthings weren't very nimble or fast, but the safety bicycle, which is the bicycle we know today, these were much more nimble, much faster and they were much more interesting to watch race around a track for six days than the pedestrians just walking.

It sort of went from a NASCAR at superslow motion to a NASCAR at slow motion. And the other advantage of the bicycle races is that especially at the end, when the competitors were completely sleep deprived, there would be spectacular crashes, and of course the crowd enjoyed that a lot.

To washington post and the redditor I quoted: Do a bit more research. What you stated implies that baseball was the reason behind the decline of the popularity of competitive walking as a sport, which is a pretty bullshit argument.

Edit: Changed a link.

Edit 2: Quoted the badhistory from the washington post article as well.