Simple Math — Dollar Driven Thinking

Major League baseball has an attendance problem. After drawing 79 million fans in 2007, attendance shrunk to just 68 million in 2019. Estimates for the pandemic-challenged 2021 season have attendance dropping below 50 million people. That is following a season when no fans made it out to watch America’s pastime. This is certainly costing the baseball owners a great deal of money, but money is one of the biggest reasons that baseball finds themselves in this predicament.

Baseball has continually made decisions that maximize short-term revenues at the expense of long-term fan engagement:

1. They’ve glorified the home run, turning a blind eye to steroids and allowing new ballparks to continually get smaller. Sure people like homeruns, but now that has resulted in homers, strikeouts, and very little action.
2. Until recently, they’ve allowed the game to grow longer and longer with replay reviews, longer commercial breaks, and more pitching changes. More pitching changes means more commercials and more money.
3. They’ve added more playoff teams to make more money. The watered down playoffs bring in more fans in the early rounds but it has resulted in less viewership for the World Series.
4. They continue to feature the Yankees and Red Sox in prime time and national coverage to gain better TV ratings rather than promote smaller market teams.
5. They partner with sports betting companies to make money off of a hollow, addicted, and capricious audience.
6. They make lucrative exclusive partnerships with video game makers, trading card companies, and more. This limits the quality and choice of consumers and reduces the breadth of the game’s reach.

How do you grow baseball revenues long-term? You engage a larger audience by fixing youth baseball so it is more fun to play. You fix the limited 11.7 scholarships for NCAA teams. You embrace what makes the sport of baseball unique and different from other pro sports. You stop trying to make the game perfect.