While striving to maintain many of baseball’s cherished traditions, guardians of the game understand they can’t stay too much in the past if they expect to keep the national pastime rich and relevant.
Major League Baseball is currently doing well at the gate and at the bank. With two decades of labor peace, MLB has consistently drawn nearly 75 million in attendance over the past several years despite escalating ticket prices. National TV ratings continue to languish, but regional telecasts are flourishing in prime time against their summer competition.
Franchise values continue to mushroom. Forbes estimates that MLB clubs are worth an average of $1.2 billion per club. Even the A’s, a budget-conscious team with an antiquated facility, have soared in value. Purchased by John Fisher and Lew Wolff in 2005 for $180 million, the club was estimated by Forbes last March to be worth $725 million. A $620 million jump in 10 years? Phenomenal.
The enormous growth that has benefited owners and players is a function of transition — the consistent changes and recognition of audience trends that will serve to make the game better and more attractive to hard-core and casual fans alike.
Cleaning up the game’s performance-enhancing drug problem is one example. Fans are starting to feel like the game is genuine again.
However, some red flags still can be found out there. Kids aren’t watching baseball like they used to, and they aren’t playing it, either. Games are too long. Despite rule changes that shaved six minutes off the average game time in 2015, games still averaged an operatic 2 hours, 56 minutes. In a world of Twitter attention spans, that won’t do.
Baseball’s efforts to bring more African-Americans back to the sport haven’t borne much fruit. Even with interleague play, the American and National leagues still play a quite different game, largely as a result of the designated hitter, which needs to be fully adopted or undergo significant alterations just for the sake of fairness.
Finally, compared with the NFL, NBA and NHL, the average fan still asserts that baseball doesn’t offer enough action. Why do the pitchers have to hit? What’s with all the defensive shifting? Why are collisions being eliminated?
Hey, we love collisions. And though we hated the drugs, we loved the long ball.
Batter up (and please stay in the box) …
If kids aren’t watching or playing baseball as often, where will the next generation of fans come from?
It’s a complicated question because kids aren’t watching or playing other sports as much, either. They’re also watching less TV and spending more time on the Internet.
Baseball may be the hardest hit of the major sports. The most recent Nielsen ratings put the average age of viewers of MLB games on TV at 55. In 2009, it was over 50. Less than 5 percent of viewers were calculated to be those ages 6-17.
That issue appears to stem from the dwindling youth baseball population. Data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, or SFIA, show that the number of youngsters ages 6-12 playing baseball has dropped from 5.4 million to 4.3 million since 2007. Among young teens, the proliferation of travel teams has made playing baseball more expensive, exclusive and time-consuming.
One common complaint is that games aren’t played unsupervised anymore. Adults are too involved, applying pressure that ultimately drives away many youths. It’s gone on long enough that parents who abandoned baseball as kids aren’t introducing the game to their own children, even in the form of a backyard catch.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred seems to understand the problem, telling the Washington Post last year, “Those are the sorts of issues we need to address.” Manfred also told the paper that playing as a kid will produce a desire to be involved in the game as you get older.
Manfred has made it a priority to win back kids. This past summer, in conjunction with USA Baseball, MLB launched the Play Ball initiative, which seeks to connect youngsters to baseball through low-pressure educational clinics, informational and tutorial websites, kid-friendly mobile apps, and a wealth of organized events for youngsters to have fun with balls, bats and gloves.
MLB is throwing big money and big-name players at the project, with numerous current and former major leaguers taking active roles.
Manfred thinks if more kids play baseball, more will watch it again. It’ll take time to reverse the current trend, but it’s an encouraging start. And it really does start at the earliest stages of exposure to the sport.
“We’ve enjoyed a successful relationship with MLB for many years, decades really,” Stephen Keener, Little League president and CEO, told SportsBusiness Journal last year. “But what Rob has done is really turn up the intensity around this issue, and made it a central piece of his administration. To be a healthy sport and a healthy operation at the major league level, kids need to be engaged. Baseball looks at Little League as one of the best farm systems for fan development.”
