I always get a kick out of "is [insert sport here] dying?" discourse, because in all my life I cannot recall a single example of it actually happening. I'm not sure what "death" would even look like. Sure, some sports get less popular, but they still play the games.
Larry Merchant had a great quote about boxing that I think can be applied to baseball as well: "Nothing will kill [it], and nothing will save it".
Even before the first officially recorded major league baseball game, people were bemoaning the death of the sport (it was 1868). As long as we keep getting sunny summer days, teams will continue to sell tickets to diehards and casual fans alike.
I wrote this for a prior post but it feels even more relevant here:
As if we needed more proof that (to paraphrase Churchill’s fake quote) God loves babies, drunks, the U.S.A. and football, we don’t need to focus on football’s lack of RSNs or its Covid timing or its handling of red/blue America or even its immunity to the player empowerment era - we can just look at how advanced analytics have crippled the watchability of the NBA and MLB while turbocharging the NFL.
NBA advance stats led teams to generally forsake everything but three pointers and free throws.
MLB advance stats led pitchers and batters to focus on the three true outcomes of home runs, strikeouts, and walks.
NFL advance stats led teams to minimize running plays in exchange for more passing plays.
The reason the NFL won with these changes is the same reason the NBA and MLB lost. The fun in these games is directly proportional to how much of the field/court is in play.
The NFL passing game revolution was both vertical and horizontal and made almost every inch of the field usable. The NBA and MLB’s revolutions took away giant swaths of the court/field and thus minimized motion and action.
I certainly have concerns about the long-term health of the sport (especially the epidemic of pitcher injuries), but I don't buy the "baseball is dying" narrative. Friend of the pod Ross Barkan has pointed out that people have been saying that for decades.
As an Orioles fan, I'm more jazzed up about baseball than I've been in a long time.
The reason I bring it up is appendix figures 6 and 7 showing cell phone pings at basketball and baseball games. Guys, basketball has a PROBLEM. The LA teams average 5000 individual device counts a game.(also, hilariously, the NBA just says every game is sold out). Baseball does not have this issue.
Maybe people grow to like baseball more as they age. I have observed this with people I know. Definitely the olds care more so there is demographic jeopardy, but I also think it's a sport people can grow into
Also, what does "dying" actually mean? Is it just that revenue will go down and players/owners will make less money? Or are we saying these sports will be like boxing where nobody understands or cares about it?
1. You can trace its decline to the urbanization of America + the digitalization of childhood. It’s not the whole story, but it’s part of it. You need kids to play. My assumption is that there are just fewer leagues in cities than there were in small towns/rural areas. And kids just don’t play outdoors as much anymore.
2. Re technology. “Amusing Ourselves to Death” was prescient. Technology begat a media race to grab our attention with shock and awe. It decreased the average attention span; even putting 162 games aside, baseball is just not a game that fundamentally can compete in such an environment.
3. Points 1 and 2 are exacerbated by a decline in regionalism. Geographic rivalries used to serve the same role as collegiate rivalries. But people move more and are less attached to their cities—it’s harder to convince kids to develop an attachment to a team because they are from a city/region, or to hate a different team because they are from a city you are supposed to hate. In the age of homogeneity, this is much harder. (Maybe teams should lean in to political identities like the Whites and Blues in Byzantium… we can have woke teams, maga teams, centrist dad teams, democratic neo liberal teams, country club conservative teams, etc…think of the story lines and heel turns, Mookie Betts denounces woke LA and signs either the Rangers, gets introduced by Clarence Thomas—media explodes, J. Hill writes worst column of all time).
3. On balance, Baseball has been declining for 55 or so years. It’s probably not done declining. But there is a floor; it’s not “dying.”
I have mixed feelings about this take. On one hand, what you're writing isn't wrong. Cable and regional money is drying up. The NBA and MLB face similar stressors. MLB has an aging fan base.
But attendance in 2023 increased over 2022. Revenue isn't everything, but the sport makes a lot of money. It's also maintains fervent regional popularity. Baseball is hugely popular in New York, LA, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston (Red Sox stinking hurting that a bit), Philadelphia, Atlanta. When the Brewers get hot, Milwaukee turns into a baseball town. San Diego has really made baseball its own.
I don't know what a sport dying really means, ultimately. Major League Baseball, like the NBA, is going to be existing in 50 years from now, barring some crazy economic or ecological catastrophe. And I'd bet it'll still have plenty of fans. Baseball may have to eventually shorten its schedule, like the NBA. I do agree with that.
One more addendum to my earlier comment on attendance is that San Francisco, actually, is doing pretty well this year. They've averaged almost 33,000 a game, which is respectable. As the weather gets better and (if) they get competitive in the West, that number will tick higher. https://www.espn.com/mlb/attendance
Half of MLB, as of mid-April, is averaging 30,000+. Those are strong attendance figures. Getting that many people to turn out when the weather is middling to lousy in much of the country is no small feat.
Ethan, you should write a post about the economic illiteracy of sports journalists. The “team valuations keep going up, ergo the sport is healthy” ignores two plus decades of us watching tech company valuations skyrocket as their revenues don’t increase at the same pace, and when that happens for too long, those same valuations crash to the ground. Valuations aren’t tethered to much beyond feeling, the same way a meme stock can fool us into thinking owning a piece of AMC is a good investment. It’s a silly argument and eventually the bottom will fall out.
Baseball is also weirdly suited for the 'second screen' world we live in. It's an ideal sport to have on in the background while using your phone - if you're one of those phone addicted people.
I'm surprised you didn't mention rule changes last year which are part of a clear attempt to recognize the problem of the sport's declining interest. They made a huge difference and across the sport attendance was up in 2023.
One thing that I think gets missed in the 'all baseball fans are old' comments is how young the crowd at an MLB ballpark usually is- lots of kids, lots of families, lots of enthusiasm. When a team like the Nats in a small city who won't compete for anything for a few years can average circa 25,000 attendance including midweek daytime games, the sport will be just fine.
To save MLB, they need forward thinking leadership and that is absolutely NOT what owners want. Imagine how much more exciting west-coast baseball would be if the Dodgers, Giants, A's, Angels and Padres played in the same division? Or if the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Phillies and Jays regularly played? There could be ways to shake things up to make it more interesting, but the old people who like MLB would hate those ideas and you can't afford to alienate them since they make up a majority of viewership.
Most sports seem to be suffering. I think only 1 premiership team turned a profit this year. Ok, yes, accounting can make things look better or worse, but the EPL is supposed to be a juggernaut.
Sports have benefited from subsidies (arenas mainly) and arent as profitable as they make us believe. What happens when locals stop voting for arena subsidies? Maybe Mahomes isnt really worth $40 and only gets $25m? Scary
>I’m not sure any other two sports could be more different while also sharing as much in common.
This is just sloppy writing. The sports are both not particularly different (one of them isn’t curling, or table tennis), so what are you even trying to say? The aren’t identical? Anyone reading this knows that. This type of verbal fluff sounds good, but think about what you are actually trying to convey.
Overall one of your weaker pieces. I think all the sports have a future of lower cultural dominance as attentions become more divided into a billion tiny bespoke feeds.
I spent 30 minutes today watching a geology of Wyoming video, then read this and commented here. I am sure 30 years ago that would have been a baseball game.
Thanks for answering my question, Ethan. I think folks don't realize the utter disaster that MLB is kind of slowly walking towards. As you said, it's an inventory sport that works when RSNs get a cut of an overall cable bill. That just won't work with more and more people cutting. For this reason, I can see why something like the MLS package on Apple TV+ makes sense, but there's definitely going to be a drop off in revenue for MLB owners to have their league-wide rights packaged with a streamer who hosts other kinds of content. It does feel like the streamers are the vultures waiting for these leagues to keel over and die, then swoop in to feast on what's left-over.
And I'm sorry, if things were looking swell for MLB, Rob Manfred (65) wouldn't have casually mentioned that he's done after his current term. Boomers who run successful businesses don't just walk away! Bud Selig didn't retire until he was in his late 70s. That itself should be alarming to people.
I always get a kick out of "is [insert sport here] dying?" discourse, because in all my life I cannot recall a single example of it actually happening. I'm not sure what "death" would even look like. Sure, some sports get less popular, but they still play the games.
Larry Merchant had a great quote about boxing that I think can be applied to baseball as well: "Nothing will kill [it], and nothing will save it".
Even before the first officially recorded major league baseball game, people were bemoaning the death of the sport (it was 1868). As long as we keep getting sunny summer days, teams will continue to sell tickets to diehards and casual fans alike.
I wrote this for a prior post but it feels even more relevant here:
As if we needed more proof that (to paraphrase Churchill’s fake quote) God loves babies, drunks, the U.S.A. and football, we don’t need to focus on football’s lack of RSNs or its Covid timing or its handling of red/blue America or even its immunity to the player empowerment era - we can just look at how advanced analytics have crippled the watchability of the NBA and MLB while turbocharging the NFL.
NBA advance stats led teams to generally forsake everything but three pointers and free throws.
MLB advance stats led pitchers and batters to focus on the three true outcomes of home runs, strikeouts, and walks.
NFL advance stats led teams to minimize running plays in exchange for more passing plays.
The reason the NFL won with these changes is the same reason the NBA and MLB lost. The fun in these games is directly proportional to how much of the field/court is in play.
The NFL passing game revolution was both vertical and horizontal and made almost every inch of the field usable. The NBA and MLB’s revolutions took away giant swaths of the court/field and thus minimized motion and action.
I certainly have concerns about the long-term health of the sport (especially the epidemic of pitcher injuries), but I don't buy the "baseball is dying" narrative. Friend of the pod Ross Barkan has pointed out that people have been saying that for decades.
As an Orioles fan, I'm more jazzed up about baseball than I've been in a long time.
So there’s this paper on cell phone location tracking and religious service attendance (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32334/w32334.pdf). I think there’s a lot to pick apart but it’s a cool paper.
The reason I bring it up is appendix figures 6 and 7 showing cell phone pings at basketball and baseball games. Guys, basketball has a PROBLEM. The LA teams average 5000 individual device counts a game.(also, hilariously, the NBA just says every game is sold out). Baseball does not have this issue.
Maybe people grow to like baseball more as they age. I have observed this with people I know. Definitely the olds care more so there is demographic jeopardy, but I also think it's a sport people can grow into
Also, what does "dying" actually mean? Is it just that revenue will go down and players/owners will make less money? Or are we saying these sports will be like boxing where nobody understands or cares about it?
A few thoughts:
1. You can trace its decline to the urbanization of America + the digitalization of childhood. It’s not the whole story, but it’s part of it. You need kids to play. My assumption is that there are just fewer leagues in cities than there were in small towns/rural areas. And kids just don’t play outdoors as much anymore.
2. Re technology. “Amusing Ourselves to Death” was prescient. Technology begat a media race to grab our attention with shock and awe. It decreased the average attention span; even putting 162 games aside, baseball is just not a game that fundamentally can compete in such an environment.
3. Points 1 and 2 are exacerbated by a decline in regionalism. Geographic rivalries used to serve the same role as collegiate rivalries. But people move more and are less attached to their cities—it’s harder to convince kids to develop an attachment to a team because they are from a city/region, or to hate a different team because they are from a city you are supposed to hate. In the age of homogeneity, this is much harder. (Maybe teams should lean in to political identities like the Whites and Blues in Byzantium… we can have woke teams, maga teams, centrist dad teams, democratic neo liberal teams, country club conservative teams, etc…think of the story lines and heel turns, Mookie Betts denounces woke LA and signs either the Rangers, gets introduced by Clarence Thomas—media explodes, J. Hill writes worst column of all time).
3. On balance, Baseball has been declining for 55 or so years. It’s probably not done declining. But there is a floor; it’s not “dying.”
I have mixed feelings about this take. On one hand, what you're writing isn't wrong. Cable and regional money is drying up. The NBA and MLB face similar stressors. MLB has an aging fan base.
But attendance in 2023 increased over 2022. Revenue isn't everything, but the sport makes a lot of money. It's also maintains fervent regional popularity. Baseball is hugely popular in New York, LA, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston (Red Sox stinking hurting that a bit), Philadelphia, Atlanta. When the Brewers get hot, Milwaukee turns into a baseball town. San Diego has really made baseball its own.
I don't know what a sport dying really means, ultimately. Major League Baseball, like the NBA, is going to be existing in 50 years from now, barring some crazy economic or ecological catastrophe. And I'd bet it'll still have plenty of fans. Baseball may have to eventually shorten its schedule, like the NBA. I do agree with that.
One more addendum to my earlier comment on attendance is that San Francisco, actually, is doing pretty well this year. They've averaged almost 33,000 a game, which is respectable. As the weather gets better and (if) they get competitive in the West, that number will tick higher. https://www.espn.com/mlb/attendance
Half of MLB, as of mid-April, is averaging 30,000+. Those are strong attendance figures. Getting that many people to turn out when the weather is middling to lousy in much of the country is no small feat.
Ethan, you should write a post about the economic illiteracy of sports journalists. The “team valuations keep going up, ergo the sport is healthy” ignores two plus decades of us watching tech company valuations skyrocket as their revenues don’t increase at the same pace, and when that happens for too long, those same valuations crash to the ground. Valuations aren’t tethered to much beyond feeling, the same way a meme stock can fool us into thinking owning a piece of AMC is a good investment. It’s a silly argument and eventually the bottom will fall out.
Baseball is also weirdly suited for the 'second screen' world we live in. It's an ideal sport to have on in the background while using your phone - if you're one of those phone addicted people.
I'm surprised you didn't mention rule changes last year which are part of a clear attempt to recognize the problem of the sport's declining interest. They made a huge difference and across the sport attendance was up in 2023.
One thing that I think gets missed in the 'all baseball fans are old' comments is how young the crowd at an MLB ballpark usually is- lots of kids, lots of families, lots of enthusiasm. When a team like the Nats in a small city who won't compete for anything for a few years can average circa 25,000 attendance including midweek daytime games, the sport will be just fine.
To save MLB, they need forward thinking leadership and that is absolutely NOT what owners want. Imagine how much more exciting west-coast baseball would be if the Dodgers, Giants, A's, Angels and Padres played in the same division? Or if the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Phillies and Jays regularly played? There could be ways to shake things up to make it more interesting, but the old people who like MLB would hate those ideas and you can't afford to alienate them since they make up a majority of viewership.
Most sports seem to be suffering. I think only 1 premiership team turned a profit this year. Ok, yes, accounting can make things look better or worse, but the EPL is supposed to be a juggernaut.
Sports have benefited from subsidies (arenas mainly) and arent as profitable as they make us believe. What happens when locals stop voting for arena subsidies? Maybe Mahomes isnt really worth $40 and only gets $25m? Scary
>I’m not sure any other two sports could be more different while also sharing as much in common.
This is just sloppy writing. The sports are both not particularly different (one of them isn’t curling, or table tennis), so what are you even trying to say? The aren’t identical? Anyone reading this knows that. This type of verbal fluff sounds good, but think about what you are actually trying to convey.
Overall one of your weaker pieces. I think all the sports have a future of lower cultural dominance as attentions become more divided into a billion tiny bespoke feeds.
I spent 30 minutes today watching a geology of Wyoming video, then read this and commented here. I am sure 30 years ago that would have been a baseball game.
As sure as pitchers and catchers report every February, so too will there be articles about baseball dying.
Thanks for answering my question, Ethan. I think folks don't realize the utter disaster that MLB is kind of slowly walking towards. As you said, it's an inventory sport that works when RSNs get a cut of an overall cable bill. That just won't work with more and more people cutting. For this reason, I can see why something like the MLS package on Apple TV+ makes sense, but there's definitely going to be a drop off in revenue for MLB owners to have their league-wide rights packaged with a streamer who hosts other kinds of content. It does feel like the streamers are the vultures waiting for these leagues to keel over and die, then swoop in to feast on what's left-over.
And I'm sorry, if things were looking swell for MLB, Rob Manfred (65) wouldn't have casually mentioned that he's done after his current term. Boomers who run successful businesses don't just walk away! Bud Selig didn't retire until he was in his late 70s. That itself should be alarming to people.