Mailbag: Is Baseball Dying?

Pretty much, though I still like baseball

At least it looks like this guy’s in the clear

We take a break from our regularly scheduled NBA-questioning to address a different sport with worse problems. A subscriber asked me if baseball is dying. Without beating around the bush, the answer is “yes.” Baseball is still very much here and lucrative (for now). Shohei Ohtani appears to be legally in the clear. And yet, despite the sport’s best efforts, it just looks to be on this inevitable slide. I am not a contrarian when it comes to the conventional wisdom about baseball’s “aging fans” issue. It’s real.

A report in the Athletic states that MLB’s Sunday morning baseball package on Peacock could be ending soon. That makes sense because how many people were even aware of Sunday morning nationally televised baseball games on Peacock? From Andrew Marchand at The Athletic:

Comcast/NBC, which runs Peacock, remains interested in a deal but for less than the $30 million per season it previously paid…

Well I should think so. Even if $30 million is a relative drop in the bucket for a broadcaster, there just isn’t that much demand for regular season baseball on a national level.

I wish it wasn’t so. I like baseball. I wish the A’s would continue to play in Oakland. But, as I watch highlights around this time of year, and survey the empty sun baked seats, it’s hard to escape the feeling of being in a town after the factory closed. Life goes on, only less so, with occasional flurries of activity. Little by little you become less and less. I think we’re at the point where, as this subscriber points out, the slowly diminished state is revealing itself more overtly.

From JD:

Is major league baseball screwed? I feel like not enough attention has been paid to how insane this past offseason was for the sport: The massive downgrade in uniforms as the league switched from Majestic to Nike, the implosion of the Bally's RSNs, the joke of a free agency that only really ended after Blake Snell signed with the Giants a week before the season started, Rob Manfred coming out and off-handedly mentioning that this is his last term as commissioner then acting surprised that it was news, and to top it all off, how embarrassingly the Oakland A's have been allowed to operate by the league (that one has been particularly tough to stomach as they were my first favorite sports team). 

It just feels like the league needs to contract, badly. There are only a few markets that actually matter, and what's worse is those teams aren't even able to be guaranteed a late postseason run. 

Without cable TV money to rake in, is MLB and their 162-game season seriously fucked? It seems like the owners are old as fuck and can't change.

Yes, I’m pretty pessimistic about baseball’s prognosis. I prefer to grouse about the NBA in part because it’s easier for me to see a way out of its current messes. MLB has this date with death that seems inexorable.

Unfortunately, from the NBA perspective, while I see baseball as more imperiled, that’s because it has basketball’s issues, only more so. Over the last couple decades, the two sports were frequently contrasted in media as having opposite trajectories. The NBA was the cool, young sport of the future and baseball fandom was old and dying. This contrast obscured how these leagues have related outcomes.

I’m not sure any other two sports could be more different while also sharing as much in common. Whatever dynamic hurts one American pastime tends to also ding the other. The Regional Sports Network collapse is bad for both. The decline in cable television is bad for both. The internationalization of players has had a similar domestic impact on both. Analytics based optimization has led to homogenous (and aesthetically lacking) playing styles in both. Baseball can’t get people to check out its games on Peacock? I’d bet the NBA would have the same issue on ESPN+.

Most roads in this territory lead back to the issue of inventory sports vs. events sports. Event sports like the NFL, college football, and UFC can command an audience in a noisy culture with their scarce, hyped, violent matchups. Baseball and basketball have existed as more as inventory, the lower key substrate of sporting life. They’ve thrived as a product that’s always there if you want at least one of them. Now, with so many competing on demand entertainment options, fewer and fewer young people really need a regular season game from these sports. That’s an issue in of itself but the related problem is that regular season interest correlates with postseason interest. If you don’t catch the public during your inventory phase (regular season), they decline to show up for your event phase (playoffs).

There’s a fashionable dismissal of such doomsaying: Baseball is fine, it’s all about the gate revenue. And yes, this is how MLB turns being an inventory sport into such a strength: 81 home games a year to pump money out of. It’s also nice to go to the park come summertime. When will it ever not be?

I just don’t buy that this is a sustainable model as interest lessens, though. Perhaps I would have had I not seen the decline of the San Francisco Giants locally. Once the hottest ticket in town, and still playing in the world’s most beautiful ballpark, the Giants were down roughly 10,000 in average attendance in 2023 versus 2017. That 2017 season was a last place finish, albeit one that involved more goodwill from the fanbase.

There are caveats, certainly. There are many reasons for why Giants attendance has dropped, including SF getting hit especially hard by the Work From Home revolution. I should also mention that overall MLB ticket buying is an odd measure of interest. Back when baseball was at its TV peak (70s and 80s), game attendance was far lower than today.

I just make the Giants observation because I never thought I’d see the day. I figured they could give that ballpark any sort of stupid corporate name and furnish it with whatever assortment of boring singles hitters and throngs would teem to a bonafide tourist attraction. My confidence in that assumption is now shaken. The Giants’ decline has reminded me that every day is one that includes fewer American baseball fans than the day before it. And so it has finally struck me that eventually, the once unimaginable collapse just happens.

The Giants are a long way from “collapse” but the falloff indicates a potential for eventual free fall, if not here, then overall for the sport. At least that’s how I see it. Around baseball’s 2024 Opening Day, ESPN tweeted a graphic featuring pitchers that were wholly unrecognizable to the average sports fan. Indeed, I’ve failed to look this up because I can’t recall a name to search. I do recall some defensive baseball writers pouncing on people who admitted their ignorance of these players. Baseball’s fine! Go away! Find a new slant!

I’ve encountered similar reactions to my myth busting of basketball’s popularity hype. Revenue is growing, team values are growing, so shut up about all this. Top end pro sports certainly remains a good business to be in. At the same time, my overall philosophy on these leagues is that weakness leads to weakness. The NBA sees viewership decline and the NFL pounces on basketball’s prized Christmas day.

When you lose purchase, you start losing. And when you fall, I don’t think there’s ever really a soft landing. It can feel like there’s a soft landing, for awhile, because the fall is so gradual. You can assume you’ll just settle in at a lower tier that’s still fairly nice. But there is no settling, absent some major reform or correction. You’ve got a date with rock bottom, even if, today, while times are still plentiful, that all feels so unimaginable.