New WaPo article on baseball relevance

From the article: 

According to Nielsen ratings, 50 percent of baseball viewers are 55 or older, up from 41 percent 10 years ago. ESPN, which airs baseball, football and basketball games, says its data show the average age of baseball viewers rising well above that of other sports: 53 for baseball, 47 for the NFL (also rising fast) and 37 for the NBA, which has kept its audience age flat.

This is why if I had a $2B I would buy an NBA team.  Basketball is the sport that is on it's way to global prominence.  It is played everywhere, it is fast and the players are the most recognizable and talented athletes on the planet if you exclude soccer.  Put a picture of Labron James next to Madison Bumgarner without their uniforms on and ask who is who.  Unless you are in San Francisco you might have to ask 20+ people to get on Bumgarner recognition, maybe 2 and certainly not more than 3 for James.  You could substitute James with probably 4 or 5 others, Kobe, Durant, Duncan, Harden and Griffen for example and get about the same result.

Someday the Timberwolves will be moved to London, Paris, Beijing or some other international city.  Going global is not going to happen in football but they have tried like crazy.  Baseball could breakout to some degree if it was smart enough to move teams to Japan and Korea and possibly China or South America someday.  Instead it is looking at Montreal ...again.

Baseball has been walking toward the cliff since the 60's and football started about 10 years ago but is about to accelerate.  Football faces huge challenges for head injuries and being replaced by lacrosse across suburbs all over the place. 

I think baseball will finally hit the wall with the baby boomers.  The youngest of them is now 50 years old.  Look for the average age to move toward 60 or higher fairly rapidly over the next 10 years.  It will take another 20 years but unless baseball can reconnect with people less than 25 to 30 in a huge way, it is in trouble.  The youngest people that can remember Mickey Mantel or Willie Mays in their primes are now about 55 - 60 years old. 

Think about this...people graduating from college today might not remember Bill Clinton  as president.  Their entire memory is of President's Bush and Obama.  If you think those guys are kids you are a baseball fan, if you think they are old, you probably are not.

A fish rots from the head. Manfred knows that he needs to make some fundamental changes, and he's looking for a quick hit with the reduction in game time. Hopefully that sets him up with other changes that will bring the average viewing age down.

If you take a look at some of the data in that WaPo article, it points to excellent baseball participation growth in the $50K+ income levels, and significant decreases below that level. There's your issue.

When we ask our kid's friends why they don't play baseball, the overwhelming response is that it's slow and boring. The younger generations are accustomed to fast. Fast technology and fast entertainment. If it isn't quick, it's boring and old. The rise in popularity of basketball and increased popularity of soccer are perfect illustrations of this.

You can also see this in the evolution of football over the last decade or so. There are two clear coaching camps. The coaches who push for fast-paced offenses and the old fashioned ground and pound coaches. The ground and pound coaches are looking for ways to keep the games a little slower, while the new crop of coaches are pushing the envelope for increasing the game tempo.

I'm not sure what baseball can do to change perceptions at this point. The push to speed up the game may help a little, but I have a feeling it's going to take a lot more than that to bring the younger kids back to the sport. Hopefully, the people who get paid the big bucks to figure this stuff out will be successful.

Well viewed in one way, soccer is sort of fast paced. I mean there are lots of people running around at any given moment.  And the ball changes hands or feet quite often.

But mostly nothing of significance happen in soccer.  It's mostly anticipation of something possibly happening that keeps people glued.  

But the same is true of baseball.  It doesn't have the same constant kinetic energy.  It involves explosive happenings  between moments of apparent stillness.  But the possibilities at any moment are quite exciting to anticipate.   So I think both soccer and baseball are sports in which anticipation and then the eventual satisfaction of anticipation is what keeps people coming back.  the way to get people to enjoy baseball is to get them to recognize the explosive possibilities with which each moment is filled. 

Except for the anticipation of something happening,  soccer too would be unwatchable.  Without the anticipation, soccer is  what basketball would be like if players just ran up and down the court mostly not taking shots at the basket,  mostly turning the ball over without scoring, and mostly missing the shots they do take. 

If you can get excited watching that but can't get excited watching baseball, I think it must be that you are addicted to constant motion as such.   Well, then baseball certainly will never satisfy you if you are a constant motion addict. But if it's the cycle of anticipation and fulfillment that hooks you, you should be able to enjoy baseball as much as soccer.

OMG, you just described the kid's basketball experience.    Painful. 

I think all sports go thru their ups and downs.  Baseball isn't doomed.  Heck, even Wrigley made into the 90's -- they have a video board. 

Baseball definitely has a problem with youth participation. There are many reasons for that (more alternatives, single-sport focus, Little League Inc, cost, etc.) and there is certainly no easy solution to that problem.

And I can agree that the lack of offense in the recent past is a factor, particularly in late innings.

But in regard the game's slow pace, I think the MLB is missing an opportunity. The current generations of young people are multitaskers. They chat, Facetime, play video games, take selfies, eat, do homework, and sometimes drive... all at the same time. What better place to multitask than at a baseball game? Look around you at the park. Half of the people are looking at their phones. I'm sure that annoys some of us old-timers, but that's a good thing for the baseball industry. They should embrace it.

Young people can go to a game and keep up with the action on the field while chatting, looking up stats, following other games, tweeting, socializing, eating, etc. All on a beautiful summer night under the stars. You can't do that at a basketball game, and certainly not at a football game. The MLB has a great opportunity to get ahead of this trend. Wifi in ballparks, real-time social media during the game, personalized customer promotions for tickets and fan gear, etc. I think they are uniquely positioned to maintain the tradition and majesty of the game, while bringing the whole fan experience into the 21st century.

I definitely agree there are things can be done to engage younger people while at the ball park, but how do you engage them to increase television viewership or participation? It's a slow paced game. Yes there are moments of anticipation, but those usually build over a period of time and are followed by minutes of low activity. I usually have a game on in the background as I do chores around the house. It's something I can listen to and don't have to watch every second. That is not appealing to many people.

As for soccer, I live in a soccer town. We only have professional basketball and professional soccer. Soccer is HUGE here and growing. We've tried for years to get a baseball team. AAA can't survive, so there really isn't a hope of landing an MLB team. We can barely support one A team. Our soccer team sells out every game. Soccer games are like a party atmosphere. Yes, there is a lot of anticipation in soccer, but those moments of anticipation seem to come more often than in baseball. If you can't appeal to the younger audience, as the viewership age trends mentioned above seem  to indicate, then where will that leave baseball in another generation? If you can only engage people at the ball park, then you are missing out on a huge portion of the population that does not live near an MLB park.      

Baseball has been boring for 150 years.  Yet MLB revenues climbed 12% in 2014 to over $9 billion.

The NFL was $10 billion and a future clouded by concussions.

The NBA has smaller revenues and is always dependent on one or two stars like Lebron or MJ.

Soccer has a foothold in the West and the Northwest in particular.  If history teaches us anything it is the trends in this country work West to East.

The 6 league attendance leaders in MSL in order are: Seattle, Toronto, LA, Portland, Vancouver and Real Salt Lake.  3 of those draw in excess of 100% capacity indicating demand is high - Seattle, Portland and Salt Lake.  In Seattle they sell about 44,000 tickets per game.

That makes 3 US West Coast teams, 2 Canadian and 1 US Mountain States team. 

It is not unreasonable to think the MSL may grow in a few years to be the 4th most attended league in the world behind Germany, England and Spain. This is not the Cosmos of the 70's.

Building on my comment about buying an NBA team earlier the US Soccer league teams probably offer the most upside in US sports at the moment.  The Seattle and LA franchises are worth approximately $175MM but might one day be worth what Yankees are worth which is an estimated $3.2B

George Steinbrenner bought them for $10MM in 1973.  Not a bad deal for the Boss.

Stating baseball is in fanciful great shape is being blind to the future. Baseball is doing well financially due to all the 50+ people with money to spend on tickets. The concern is about the future.

Baseball is concerned about something I mentioned about twelve years ago. What happens to baseball when dad didn't play and doesn't sign his son up for baseball. Our kids are in the first generation where kids walked away from baseball at an early age for other "more fun" sports. When my son was little he liked soccer and basketball more than baseball. To this day he's a bigger fan of basketball than baseball. He loves to play baseball. He's not a big fan of watching unless it's at a park.

i recently posted an article from the Boston Globe regrading the Red Sox's concern over the next generation of fans. They made being a member of Jr Red Sox Nation free. Student tickets are $9. But that doesn't necessarily get them in front of the tv for the future ratings and advertising dollars.