I watched the Dodgers’ National League Championship Series game with the Cubs that ended early this morning, and I was struck by two things I saw in the crowd.

–Even this late in the season (but not at all that late on a Los Angeles night), Dodgers fans are going to leave early in an attempt to beat traffic. (This has been going on forever. Go look at the Kirk Gibson home run from Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, and notice all the empty seats.)

–The fans TV viewers are most likely to see appear to be old. In some cases, seriously old. Larry-King-old. Which doesn’t exactly help baseball’s reputation as a sport for geriatrics.

We could predict some of this. Fans who are most often on camera are those sitting directly behind home plate, where the tickets usually are most expensive. People with the kind of money to spend on those seats tend to be, oh, mature. Like Mary Hart, 65, and her husband Burt Sugarman, 77, the TV producer.

Or beyond mature, like Larry King, who is 82 — and just looks older.

You would think that the Dodgers could lure a mid-career Hollywood celebrity or 10 to sprinkle through the crowd, especially behind home plate. They wouldn’t even have to be ultra-hip or particularly young celebrities — just on the low side of 60.

Baseball has an image problem — it appears to be a sport having trouble attracting young people.

The “national pastime” really was just that — 50 years ago.

Since then, football and, of late, basketball have caught or surpassed baseball as the favored game of the post-Baby Boom generations.

This is an age of short attention spans, and baseball sometimes can exhaust the patience of “kids” in a single at-bat.

Ball 1. Pitcher takes a walk behind the mound. He picks up the rosin bag and get back on the rubber. He stares in for a sign. And stares. The batter gets tired of waiting and steps out. The pitcher gets off the rubber. The catcher goes through the signs again. The pitcher takes a look at a runner on first base and throws over there.

And so on and so on. Everyone who has watched baseball has seen how time can be spent/wasted in the little activities during a six-or-seven-pitch at-bat.

It’s not as if baseball’s popularity has collapsed. Major League teams sold 73.6 million tickets for the 2016 regular season, which will, as usual, put MLB miles ahead in attendance of any other sports league in the world.

But that total was down 447,000 from 2015, a loss of less than 1 percent but, still, a decline almost halfway to a million.

We have a sense that many fans are consuming the sport in more elliptical ways now. Looking at boxes the morning after without actually watching a game. Seeing how their “fantasy” players did.

And younger Americans just don’t seem very interested. They often say the game bores them. It doesn’t help that more than a few ballplayers suggest they would rather have played another game, and do not watch baseball games they are not playing in.

Certainly, baseball doesn’t seem to be a game that stimulates a lot of water-cooler talk anymore. Not unless the water cooler is located in Leisure World.

It doesn’t help that postseason games often are brutally long (the Dodgers and Cubs had a four-hour, 32-minute game this week) and tend to begin at 8 p.m. on the East Coast, ending well after most potential young fans are in bed.

By then, some of the wrinkled folks in the good seats have shuffled off to the parking lot, and most of the old faces are gone — leaving behind empty seats that appear in the background of nearly every pitch.

To be clear, this isn’t a rant against old people; I’m one myself. It isn’t about chasing old, wealthy fans from their seats. It is about mixing in a few Millennials or Gen-Exers (and maybe even their kids) in the rows behind the plate.

So that the millions watching on TV see something other than wrinkled faces or empty chairs in the stadium’s most valuable seats.