The outcomes may be clear, but the rules are often far from simple--basketball is fundamentally simple, but the rules as laid out are quite lengthy, and as practiced have a great deal of nuance; American football rules are amazingly complex; and baseball has the infield fly rule, which is enough to puzzle most casual fans.
Even without betting, spectator team sports offers the fan tons of information--statistics are vital to every team sport that I can think of. And it is true that the conflicts have no immediate consequences or casualties-- but then so does any performed art.
What baseball, for example, shows is that millions of Americans can pay attention to tons of information and not only understand it, but understand its implications. (Ask any Yankee fan--wait, ask a Mets fan--what Roger Clemens joining the Yankees means, and you will get an informed opinion.)
To pick up on what someone else wrote, the salaries paid to successful players have done little recently to dampen fans' appreciation of professional sports--20 to 30 years ago, there was much more public handwringing about player salaries and how they were ruining the game; it is, I think, much clearer to most fans that players deserve the salaries that they get.
The question that I have is how to translate the ardor for and knowledge of professional sports into ardor for and knowledge of things political.
--tim francis-wright