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.

In TOS they didn’t have holodecks.

A space ship might fit bowling lanes but not a whole baseball field.

"Fucking Gary. That creep can roll, man."

Bowling is fun

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.

Bowling is common worldwide, baseball isn't.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.