How did Minor League Baseball Reconnect to its Latino Fan Base?
The sport of baseball is so linked to Latin America that it might be one of the strongest connections in sports. MLB is comprised of roughly 32% players of Latino descent and that continues to be among the highest percentages of any sport in the world.
But the question is, does that mean it is attracting baseball fans? That’s something Kurt Hunzeker, Vice President of Minor League Business Operations, has been figuring out over the past few years. He recently discussed this and more, at Sport’s Business Journal’s All-In Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion conference in Cleveland.
Lucky for us Cleveland is our hometown and we got to experience it live.
Here’s what some of the numbers showed:
- MiLB had 106 million people identified as fans back in 2016
- In 160 team markets across the United States, 17.1% of MiLB fans were Latino (approximately 18 million people)
- MiLB had roughly 14.5 million unique attendees that year, with the average fan attending three games that season
- The nearly 38 million total fans who attended MiLB games that year was the second-most for a North American sport that year (only behind MLB)
- Of those attendees, only 13% of those fans were Latino
This pushed Hunzeker to dig even deeper into the matter.
“First and foremost, why are Latino fans not attending our games? If the hardest thing is to get someone to recognize who you are, we have that more than 17%,” Hunzeker said. “I’m a fan of minor league baseball’ but they weren’t coming to our ballparks. So then once we try to figure that out, then it’s ‘how do we convert them into game attendees?’ So that’s where the journey begins for us. So again, this is 2016. We have 160 teams in 43 states across the country. 110 of them are in the top 100 Hispanic [Designated Market Areas]. According to Nielsen, 42 are in the top 25. Great starting point. Bad news, less than a quarter of our team’s hosted a Hispanic Heritage night promotion the year before.
“ … So this was the offseason after 2016. Bad news continuing; 82.5% percent of our teams were drawing a smaller percentage of Latinos than what the Census reported. So almost across the board, we’re missing a huge chunk of a fan base that loves baseball. Forty percent of our players are Latino. What are we doing wrong?”
What Hunzeker found was that teams were going about things the wrong way. Seeing that fans weren't necessarily being served properly in their communities, he went directly to them to address the data he found. Unfortunately, what Hunzeker found out was that many Latino fans did not feel welcomed inside the ballparks.
But that was just the tip of the iceberg; Hunzeker discovered that even some of the initiatives brought forth to connect with the Latino fan base were things that unexpectedly turned them away.
“Hispanic Heritage night does not work. And there’s [a] reason why; there’s no S,” Hunzeker said. “They say ‘yeah, you know what, you guys play 70-plus home games a year. Hispanic night, great. What about the other 69, 72? Whatever [games]? Great question. Good observation, shame on us.”
This same sentiment was shared about teams taking “Los” or “Las” and putting it in front of their team nickname, rather than converting the team name from English to Spanish.
What came of that? A season-long celebration called Copa de la Diversión. Rather than making the then-Las Vegas 51s “Los 51s,” Hunzeker was dedicated to rebranding teams in MiLB with the intention to connect with the respective Latino communities that teams played in.
“Let’s work with a civic organization like a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. In Las Vegas, it was actually the Hispanic museum,” Hunzeker said. “And we learned within I think two minutes of our first conversation with the Nevada Hispanic Museum, that the immigrants who came up from Mexico really drove why the Silver State is the Silver State today. So it took literally all of two minutes to realize that Silver Kings could work quite well. It tells an excellent story, especially when you start calling it the Reyes de Plata. So Las Vegas, because they know that community said, Alright, let’s do this. We have a good name, we have a great logo. Thanks for making it for us.”
There was more learning to be done for Hunzeker and MiLB. The 51s suggested debuting these Reyes de Plata jerseys on a Tuesday evening. While Tuesday may not be the most frequented day for games on the slate, the team found that many of their Latino fans were attending games those nights because they often worked weekends.
MiLB rolled this out across the league in 2017 initially as Es Divertido Ser Un Fan (translated as “It’s Fun to Be a Fan”) with four teams: the 51s (Reyes de Plata), Charlotte Knights (Charlotte Caballeros), Visalia Rawhide (Visalia Toros), and the Kane County Cougars (who kept their nickname during the promotion). In a one-year span from 2016 to 2017, the plan was to grow game attendance by 3%. But these teams saw an even more considerable boost, as it was logged at 16.7% across 14 games. There was also a 577% increase from the estimated amount in merchandising sales.
The promotion was changed to Copa de la Diversión ahead of the 2018 season. There were 33 MiLB teams who took part and it led to a 12.6% increase in attendance. And again, it cannot be overstated how integral the merchandise piece was for Copa de la Diversión. That includes selling merchandise in a market like Erie, Pa. where the Erie SeaWolves switched to the Piñatas de Erie, despite 1.8% of their city’s population being Hispanic.
“We could not keep up and particularly Alburquerque went from the Albuquerque Isotopes to the Mariachis de Nueva Mexico and in San Antonio, they’re the San Antonio Missions forever. They became the Flying Chanclas and sold so much merchandise … effectively they sold more Flying Chanclas merchandise in the previous 10 years of Missions combined,” Hunzeker said.
The following season in 2019 saw more growth with 72 teams in total taking part, which led to a nearly 28% rate in attendance growth from 2018. And even with the pandemic affecting MiLB operations in 2020 and cutting down to 120 MiLB teams in its new partnership with MLB, 76 took part in 2021 and saw more connectivity for the teams and their Latino fans. Even playing in two post-pandemic seasons, the growth has continued — from 2020 to 2021, there was a 22.6% increase in fan attendance in Copa games vs. non-Copa games.
The 2022 season has been another sign of success for MiLB with Copa, as the league has 85 teams currently competing in Copa and there’s a 17.4% increase in game crowds thus far, which can be attributed to approximately 1.4 million fans attending games. The 2023 season already looks bright, with 75% of the Copa teams hosting at least three games, with some hosting as many as 12.
It can be uplifting to see how people from the outside view a league and its initiatives. But the alignment from people within that league on Copa matters shows just how important this is for MiLB and how the league has done right by its Latino communities.
“Guess who loves talking about Copa? The players, the front office staff, the fans, so much that we can do that doesn’t have to be about baseball,” Hunzeker said. “Really doesn’t. People love coming to minor league baseball games because the food’s great. And similar to what they have here, we’ve taken a lot of these cool Latino dishes and just incorporate it into our into our concession stands all season long. It’s not just for the three games or the eight games, 10 games.”
What did we learn?
The first thing that MiLB did was audit itself when it thought things were in good standing with its Latino community. But rather than finding ways to not reach its fan base, MiLB took its issues head-on and went directly to the source to address them.
One other piece of this is that MiLB did its best to truly connect with fans. Not just one Hispanic Heritage Night or Los 51s jerseys. Doing the research necessary to highlight traditions, historical references, food, and other components of Latino culture allowed Copa to pop overall as a promotion.
When considering market analysis for fan engagement, there are not many leagues that have done so as well as MiLB and baseball in general. Whether it’s been connecting to the Latino community, those living with disabilities, and other specific groups, baseball has shown to put its arm around its fan bases and address issues to help better accommodate them. This has led to the MiLB gaining enough notoriety to inspire other leagues and teams to follow its lead. That even goes down to the youth level with Little League Baseball.
“This is our icebreaker to becoming the best part, the best selves that we can possibly be as Minor League Baseball. And it’s been a ton of fun to build,” Hunzeker said. “And it can be absolutely replicated. Across the board. We saw it. … San Antonio had an AHL team [the San Antonio Rampage]. And they call up directly like, ‘Hey, we love this Flying Chanclas everybody’s talking about it. We’re totally stealing your idea.’ To which I replied, ‘I’ll give you the playbook. We want this to work for everybody.’ We decided to think differently. Like Moneyball, how can we do something that really no one’s ever done before? But our fans kind of expected it when we launched it. People are like, ‘yeah, that’s totally what Minor League Baseball would do. But now we’re doing it at a scale. And now with the resources of Major League Baseball, sky’s the limit. And I think that’s what we’re really, really excited about.”
And the future looks bright, to say the least. Hunzeker said MiLB plans to expand into other cultures. That’s already started in 2022 with The Nine — an outreach effort intending to connect with MiLB’s Black community through youth baseball and softball opportunities, highlighting Black figures and their impact on the game of baseball and helping to diversify the business side of baseball with opportunities for Black employees. The program is in honor of legendary Black baseball player Jackie Robinson, who wore №9 in his lone MiLB season with the Montreal Royals.
The Nine already has 60 teams partaking in activities in 2022 and it is expected to grow beyond 100 in 2023. The next initiative could be Pride-focused, which Hunzeker said should begin by 2025.
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