Written by, Jake Hatch
On the 8th day of Christmas baseball gave to me: a marketable MLB.
It's been widely discussed among sports-talk circles that baseball has a serious problem with youth engagement. With the average watcher being 57 years old—and getting older by the year—both Millennials and Generation Z are simply not interested in watching baseball. A sport that once thrived on serial watchers that used to tune in every night to watch the game, is struggling to keep the same popularity with this current generation of sports fans.
Unfortunately for baseball, this is far from surprising. Given the amount of time that Generation Z spends on their phones—over 5 hours a day—it is difficult to imagine my generation ever watching baseball as religiously as previous generations did. Does that just mean baseball is doomed?
Well not exactly. Youth participation rates have fallen since in the last decade baseball, down to 13.6% in 2018 from 16.5% in 2008, but they've been rising over the past few years: which the MLB has stated they are encouraged by. I have never thought that the issue for baseball was that not enough kids were playing though.
Baseball is a difficult sport to watch as a casual fan. There's just not enough action to enjoyably watch a game without understanding the nuances of the sport, and as games continue to get longer by the year, something absolutely needs to be done with pace of play. Speeding up pace of play would certainly help, but regardless of the speed of games, there really isn't a large demographic of young people that seem interested in tuning into baseball games. I've played baseball since tee-ball, and even out of the most avid players that I've been on teams with, most of them do not consistently watch baseball games on TV. The issue therefore, seems to lie more in the watchabilty for the generation as a whole, as opposed to the watchability for non-baseball players. The MLB needs to find a way to mend this massive disconnect, or professional baseball simply will not be able to survive as one of the major sports in the U.S.
A better social media presence could aid the MLB in trying to reach out to the younger demographic. Baseball is a really good sport for social media marketing—as home-runs and great defensive plays make fantastic highlight clips—but the MLB generally struggles to reach the same degree of social media presence that football and basketball do. They can also try to speed up pace of play or implement some sort of salary cap or at least a spending floor to try to make the smaller markets more competitive. The NFL is being well served by a greater degree of parity in the league this season, and it could be a way to attract fans to a greater portion of the MLB.
The biggest issue for baseball though, is that the culture of the sport simply needs to change. The fact that there was even discussion about whether Fernando Tatis Jr. should've taken a 3-0 pitch instead of hitting a grand slam because of "unwritten rules about running up the score" is simply an embarrassment to the sport. Or tasteless comments by the older generation of people affiliated with baseball, such as when Pirates announcer Robert Blass said about Ronald Acuña Jr. after getting hit by a pitch: "With a young player doing all that stuff and all the jewelry and all the stuff, back in the day—I'm not saying it's right or wrong". These type of people in baseball need to be removed from the game immediately, and the league needs to completely shift towards marketing the personalities of these exact type of high-energy players in baseball. The issue isn't whether the players in the league are marketable—Acuña, Tatis, Harper, Freeman, Anderson, Guerrero, Betts and so many more are all examples of marketable players—but whether the MLB has the sense to use these players to their advantage.
With the NFL making strides to reach out to the youth demographic by televising a playoff game on Nickelodeon, the MLB needs to do the same to match them by trying to attract younger fans. Pace of play needs to be sped up, and other issues need to be addressed too, but it isn't like the NFL or the NBA don't have issues with bad rules either that detract from the watching experience. The MLB likely will not be able to ever get back the type of fanbase that sits down and tunes into a baseball game every day, but they certainly can be doing a better job with marketing than they currently are. The technological age will be difficult to overcome for baseball, but the fact that the KBO out of South Korea—a more technologically advanced country than the U.S—is able to sustain such an avid fanbase stands as some proof that the MLB could pull it off, if they try to embrace a more fun, family friendly atmosphere as opposed to the buttoned-up archaic formula that only attracts the older generation.
It's time that baseball comes to its senses and makes some long overdue changes.