NY Times: How Popular Is Baseball, Really?

[Blake]

 

Great post. To address your last paragraph, one thing MLB could do right now with technology is cutting back or eliminating their ridiculous blackout rules on the MLB.tv app...

I'm 29 and haven't had a traditional cable subscription in 8+ years. If you're a cord cutter and live in certain areas of the country, let's say Iowa, you could be blacked out from Twins, Cubs, White Sox, Royals, and Cardinals games on MLB.tv.

Granted, these days you can buy YouTube TV, Sling, Hulu, etc. that comes with regional sports channels... But still, give people access to your product if you want them to watch it.

In looking through the article, it doesn't seem to touch on the national fan base of teams.

 

I live in CA and watch a lot of Twins games, via mlb.tv.

 

Local reach may be somewhat stagnant but national reach has to be incredible for MLB.

[biggentleben]

 

And on time of game -- I would love shorter games, and a quicker pace. But it's worth remembering the average time of game was still 2:30 as far back as 1954.

 

Yes, it's jumped by 20-30 minutes since the 1980s, and I'd prefer to roll that back -- but there has really never been a time when the average time of game would make frequent game viewership meaningfully more palatable. (Unless perhaps you want to get rid of stadium lighting and night games! )

 

Time of game jumped with the influx of media-related delays. Baseball is doing everything BUT reducing media delays in order to quicken pace.

 

I remember growing up that Twins games on the radio would often come back from a commercial break with a pitch or two already completed. Letting the media control the game pace instead of the other way around is your big reason things jumped so fast - not home runs, strikeouts, relievers, or any other thing that adds microseconds to an average game over the course of a year.

[Otto von Ballpark]

 

Time of game jumped with the influx of media-related delays. Baseball is doing everything BUT reducing media delays in order to quicken pace.

 

I remember growing up that Twins games on the radio would often come back from a commercial break with a pitch or two already completed. Letting the media control the game pace instead of the other way around is your big reason things jumped so fast - not home runs, strikeouts, relievers, or any other thing that adds microseconds to an average game over the course of a year.

Actually, evidence suggests that the biggest recent jump seems to be time between pitches, rather than commercial breaks:

 

https://www.sbnation.com/a/mlb-2017-season-preview/game-length

[ashbury]

I agree. I once heard a radio sports commentator say the Football is a sport you watch, Baseball is a sport you follow.

Don't remember that quote before, but it resonates. Others have commented in response already, but I just want to add that this seems really fundamental, and presents a challenge: how do you monetize that, to the tune of billions necessary to compete for athletic talent to keep it all going?

[biggentleben]

 

Actually, evidence suggests that the biggest recent jump seems to be time between pitches, rather than commercial breaks:

 

https://www.sbnation.com/a/mlb-2017-season-preview/game-length

 

...and Grant has allowed that mid-80s WGN return from commercials likely led to a lot of dead air time right around commercials that we don't see now along with more commercials than the average game in the same era had. The Twitter discussion from the article was very, very good, and Grant conceded a lot of potential adjustments to the overall conclusion in the article.

 

In one of the most commercialized regular season environments in 1984, he found nearly 10 minutes more commercials in an average game 30 years later. That's telling.

[ashbury]

Buy the product, just don't buy the stock.    

And yet the folks who HAVE bought the stock in the past 30 years (the owners) seems to be doing all right with it.

 

I didn't mean to paint a gloomy picture. The sport HAS monetized the way people follow it. I just thought it was a particularly trenchant way of stating the business model. It's the (or, a) right way to look at how the sport must evolve, as one revenue stream declines and another potentially replaces it.

 

The situation is better than for some sports. If I would to modify the quote, it might be "Football is a sport interesting to watch, Baseball is a sport interesting to follow, Soccer is a sport interesting to play." (A European colleague once pointed the latter point out to me, as his rationale.) That serves as a starting point for the relatively difficult time soccer has had in the US - although not elsewhere in the world of course. A corollary is to study carefully how soccer does it elsewhere, and see what might apply to baseball.

[Otto von Ballpark]

 

...and Grant has allowed that mid-80s WGN return from commercials likely led to a lot of dead air time right around commercials that we don't see now along with more commercials than the average game in the same era had. The Twitter discussion from the article was very, very good, and Grant conceded a lot of potential adjustments to the overall conclusion in the article.

 

In one of the most commercialized regular season environments in 1984, he found nearly 10 minutes more commercials in an average game 30 years later. That's telling.

Given that he actually added up the extra time between pitches and the difference *in those alone* was 25 minutes, I'm guessing it's at least 50% of the difference, if not more.

 

If you can find a link to that Twitter discussion, I'd love to read it. I just searched Brisbee's, SB Nation's, and McCovey Chronicle's tweets and I couldn't come up with anything.