MLB: Drive To Survive in a Competitive Market
No one asked me, but given the trends in attendance, the average age of MLB fans, and the fluctuations in ratings over the past few years, along with the dwindling page space and airtime given to baseball by mainstream media outlets relative to their coverage of other sports, it seems undeniable that baseball no longer holds the “America’s Pastime” title, but rather the considerably less catchy moniker: “America’s Third or Maybe Fourth Favorite Sport.” The battle for consumers’ time and attention wages on, and while baseball started in the pole position, it scraped the wall a few times and now sits a lap down.
The entertainment market is oversaturated. Viewers easily scroll through endless options and click away from any selection that doesn’t immediately spark joy. “The only game in town” marketing strategy simply no longer suffices. So again, while no one asked me, I’m here to offer some unsolicited advice to MLB on how to better sell their game and the characters, settings, and themes that make up its stories. In other words, I’d like to improve their drive to survive within a competitive market.
This article is the first of a three-part series. This edition will provide an overview of alternative forms of supplemental content the league might use to entice new viewers and the potential benefits such content yields. Part II will explore the specifics of how to make supplementary content effective, while Part III will shift the perspective to focus on marketing strategies for individual players at all levels of baseball.
[Extreme Russell Wilson Voice] FanGraphs Nation, Let’s Ride! (Consider this an example of how not to market yourself.)
When we think of MLB content and the media rights deals the league signs to sell its content, we naturally think of the on-field product. The actual games are what ESPN, Fox, and Turner Broadcasting agreed to pay 12 billion with a “b” dollars to exclusively air on their platforms over seven years starting in 2022. The deals also include the option for pre and post game shows during the playoffs and studio shows like Baseball Tonight, but mostly they want the games.
ESPN, Fox, and Turner have sewn themselves into the fabric of baseball broadcasting. They’ve stitched their logo into MLB’s underwear, so everyone knows they own those TV rights in case of a gym class locker room mixup. Nevertheless, as the way we watch television continues to evolve, and on-demand streaming occupies a larger and larger market share, those in the broadcast business see the value in sports as one of the few products still consumed live.
As we know, the national cable networks don’t broadcast every game for every team, but rather select a subset of games to feature. The other entities claiming broadcast rights are regional sports networks (RSNs) who negotiate those rights with individual teams. However, the RSN business model becomes more precarious by the day, leaving MLB needing to pivot to a temporary solution while they attempt to modernize how they broadcast games in the future.
Aside from the mainstay broadcast partners, others are seeking to grab a patch of market share in the sports domain. Apple TV+ began offering Friday Night Baseball in 2022 (it went really smoothly — no one took issue with it whatsoever), and now owns the exclusive rights to MLS. Amazon Prime took over Thursday Night Football, affording it the privilege of airing Colts/Broncos every single week for some reason (I’m hearing in my earpiece it wasn’t actually Colts/Broncos every week, it only felt like it). NBC ported parts of the Olympics over to Peacock. I have to subscribe to something called Fubo if I want to watch the Pac-12 Network, and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Hulu has live sports.
The silence from one particular streaming service with respect to live sports is as deafening as the drumbeats that pulse through your speakers every time you open the app. Netflix, the flagship streamer, doesn’t offer Tuesday Night Tennis, or Water Sports Wednesday, or Saturday Morning Slamball. (Although, I would absolutely watch Saturday Morning Slamball.) That doesn’t mean they don’t see value in sports, but rather that they choose to pursue it in a different way.
Many on the internet have argued that reality shows such as The Bachelor, Project Runway, and Top Chef are sports, and I’ve long held that the reverse is also true: sports are reality TV. Netflix agrees with me, but they took it a step further and started making reality shows about the reality show that is sports. They said to themselves, “Sports are basically a reality show already, let’s just shove it into the same format as Selling Sunset and put it out as supplementary viewing.” (To be clear, I don’t sit-in on content brainstorming meetings at Netflix, but I assume this is how it went down.)
Thus, in March of 2019, Formula 1: Drive to Survive debuted on Netflix, highlighting the major storylines, characters, and settings from the 2018 season, and arriving just in time for the checkered flag to wave on the first race of the 2019 season. Around the same time, ESPN signed a deal to broadcast Formula 1 races for $5 million per year from 2019-2022. Starting in 2023, with three total seasons of Drive to Survive available on Netflix, ESPN won a bidding war to sign a new rights deal with F1, now paying a minimum of $75 million annually to carry races. Meanwhile, viewership has more than doubled, going from around half a million viewers per race in 2017 and 2018 to 1.2 million viewers per race in 2022. Attendance at U.S. races also doubled, leading F1 to add more U.S. races to the schedule this coming season. All-in-all, the show paid dividends for Liberty Media, the entity that owns Formula 1 and also happens to own the Atlanta Braves.
The bet on original sports content, rather than live sporting events, worked out for Netflix as well. Season 3 of Drive to Survive was the seventh-most watched show on the platform during its debut month, while season 4 of the series was the most watched show globally on Netflix a few days after its release (season 5 had the misfortune of dropping the same day as season 3 of Outer Banks, which put a stranglehold on the top spot, but it still checks in at 31st in popularity among TV offerings on the platform for 2023).
Netflix felt good enough about the show’s concept to produce a golf version of the series entitled Full Swing, which debuted this year. It seems like a huge missed opportunity to not just call it PGA: Drive to Survive, since y’know driving applies to golf too, but as ever, no one asked me. Coincidentally, MLB: Drive to Survive works nicely as well, and if they don’t want to end up as irrelevant as Thom Brennaman after Nick Castellanos drove a ball to deep left field, they should maybe consider a docu-series as an option.
(Netflix also made an iteration of the show that focuses on tennis and has a cycling edition in production, but I’m not as convinced I can make those work with my give-them-all-the-same-title joke, so we’re going to ignore them.)
F1 and Netflix experienced positive growth in all the ways MLB is currently shrinking. Obviously correlation isn’t causation, but according to a 2022 survey conducted by Morning Consult, 53% of U.S. F1 fans say Drive to Survive influenced their fandom, so this isn’t merely happenstance. Since MLB is already in the process of transitioning from the RSN model in terms of how it broadcasts the actual games (which will likely include a loss of revenue at least in the short-term while it navigates the best method for monetizing à la carte streaming), why not add a new media revenue stream by taking a page from the Netflix playbook and running with some original, narrative content? The payout for MLB would not include the doubled attendance and a 15-times spike to their media rights valuation enjoyed by F1 given the differences in circumstances surrounding the two sports, but more on that in Part II.
Drive to Survive isn’t the only type of sports docu-series designed to spark interest in a specific league or team. The HBO series Hard Knocks goes inside training camp for a different NFL team each year and has become a ceremonial start to the season for many NFL fans; it recently expanded to include an in-season spinoff as well.
Furthermore, near-real-time docu-series like Drive to Survive and Hard Knocks are only one type of complementary content among a whole field of options. A documentary need not exclusively focus on a professional league for the league to benefit. Last Chance U documents football and basketball at the junior college level, highlighting the positives these sports bring to the world even for non-star athletes and their families. The series is not a direct commercial for the NBA or the NFL, but it generates the kind of positive vibes around each sport that leagues benefit from as they attempt to counterbalance their poor track records on player safety, workplace misconduct, and systemic racism.
Of course, the classic approach to documentary storytelling takes on tales of yore, where the value-add lies in bringing to life scenes buried deep in the sport’s history that have previously been left either forgotten or untold. Baseball has this base fairly well covered (The Battered Bastards of Baseball and No No: a Dockumentary are two of my personal faves). In recent years though, the entertainment industry as a whole has figured out how much the general public likes getting punched in the feels by nostalgia. Since youth is wasted on the young, we like to go back and relive it as adults. Every mildly successful show from the ‘80s and ‘90s now gets a remake, reboot, or spinoff.
Following the trend, docuseries such as The Last Dance and dramas such as Winning Time bring fans back to the stories that hooked them on the sport in the first place. “The History of the Seattle Mariners by Secret Base” on YouTube lights up the part of my brain where the warm summer memories of childhood live, but imagine if they’d had the budget and access to hand Randy Johnson or Ken Griffey Jr. an iPad and let them react to old highlights. Johnson probably wouldn’t have said much, but think of the meme-potential in his facial expressions.
YouTube contains a cornucopia of effective baseball storytelling, which we’ll discuss more in Part II, but YouTube content is limited in its reach and production quality, so stories marketed from the platform have capped potential benefits much lower than content produced for the major TV networks and streaming services. Typically, YouTube consumers go to the platform in search of niche content specific to their interests, rather than shows marketed to the masses. A few series, such as Hot Ones, have transcended the platform and found their way into mainstream pop culture, but in general, content seeking to create new fans needs to go where the potential new fans exist, not where the sickos go to dive deeper on their existing fandom.
Documentaries aside, the NBA benefits from several of its active players hosting podcasts, among them The Draymond Green Show, The CJ McCollum Show, and The ETCs with Kevin Durant. Green has even been known to record a podcast immediately after playing in a Finals game. Imagine Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper hopping behind a mic right after Game 3 of the 2022 World Series to discuss what Harper whispered to Alec Bohm right before going deep against Lance McCullers Jr. On the NFL side, the weekly appearances by Aaron Rodgers on The Pat McAfee Show generate enough media buzz to keep attention firmly focused on the sport even during the offseason. Or if darkness retreats aren’t your thing, the Kelce brothers team up to host a podcast, named in homage to their hometown with a description dubbing them “Football’s funniest family duo.” (I appreciate the alliteration, but that’s a fairly bold claim given all the nepotism in the NFL — see also: Peyton and Eli Manning, Rob and Rex Ryan, Bill and Steve Belichick, etc.)
And to add to its catalog of behind-the-scenes sports content, Netflix plans to release a show this summer that zooms in on the role of NFL quarterbacks, in part by drawing on audio gathered during the 2022-23 season in which Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota were all mic’d up for every single game. MLB has struggled through several attempts to generate mic’d up content that is compelling without generating cringe or safety concerns, but removing the live element and editing together the good stuff after the fact may be the winning formula. A full season recap of Mookie on the mic, or getting to listen in on catchers conversing with their pitchers between innings, or a series on the banter that occurs when runners reach first base? Sign me up.
But does the intrigue formed while watching a docu-series or listening to a podcast always translate to more fans watching games? Jody Avirgan of the Good Sport podcast says no. “I watch [Hard Knocks] every season. I love it. Full of stakes, full of storylines. But I gave up watching actual NFL football years ago, and no matter how good Hard Knocks is, I’m not finding my way back to the actual games.”
That outcome is certainly suboptimal. However, the show itself serves as a source of revenue, so people who only watch these shows, even if they never watch a game, still contribute to the bottom line. Moreover, it sends more people out into the world to talk about the sport with their friends and family and coworkers, which contributes to the type of pop culture FOMO that draws more people in. And maybe those non-game-watchers still buy and wear merch, or don’t watch during the regular season, but tune in for the playoffs, since they now have some idea of what’s going on. There are many levels of new fandom for MLB to aspire to here.
A particular level of F1 fandom that MLB aspires to improve upon is that of global fandom. On Good Sport, Avirgan interviews Jessica Smetana, a sports journalist and relatively new Formula 1 enthusiast about her journey to F1 fandom. Smetana counts the global nature of F1 as one of the appealing factors, “[T]eams being based in different countries and races being all over the world. It felt like I was simultaneously watching sports, but also maybe a mini travel documentary.”
MLB’s recent efforts to expand its global reach include games played in Australia, Japan, Mexico, and the UK, with more international games on the schedule this year in London and Mexico City, and a Paris game scheduled for 2025. When airing in the United States, Drive to Survive carries the advantage of introducing its audience to an entirely new sport. To seize upon a similar advantage, a baseball reality show needn’t air exclusively in North America, where most people already know about baseball. Instead the show could become a vehicle to reach new fans around the world.
During the WBC, we learned that roughly half of all Japanese households with a TV tuned in to watch Japan’s quarterfinal game against Italy, while 61% of households with a TV in Puerto Rico watched their team face off with the Dominican Republic. Japan, Puerto Rico and a host of other countries have their own popular professional leagues, but with that level of enthusiasm for the WBC, perhaps the thirst for baseball is not fully satiated.
One could make similar arguments for serving more MLB content to countries like the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Venezuela, but to truly replicate F1’s strategy, the move to be made is getting this type of content to places like the UK, Italy, Israel, and so on and so forth. Target countries with the existing kindling to ignite a firestorm of baseball fandom, but that would still benefit from a splash of lighter fluid to really get crackling, perhaps by starting with a Hard Knocks-esque telling of the national teams preparing for the WBC.
Last but not least among the potential benefits of non-game content, F1 experienced one important decrease in their numbers following their Drive to Survive glow up. The average age of a Formula 1 fan dropped from 36 in 2017 to 32 in 2023. As the average age of an MLB fan creeps uncomfortably close to the average life expectancy in the U.S., giving younger fans a show to binge watch with their friends after they catch up on the new season of Love is Blind feels like a worthwhile endeavor.
That’s all for Part I! Check back soon for Part II to read all about how to actually make a baseball docu-series and other types of complementary content work to attract new fans. In the meantime, feel free to use the comment section to brainstorm the best baseball player/reality show combo, e.g. Enrique Hernández on America’s Next Top Model or Max Scherzer on Beat Bobby Flay.
Kiri lives in the PNW while contributing part-time to FanGraphs and working full-time as a data scientist. She spent 5 years working as an analyst for multiple MLB organizations. You can find her on Bluesky @kirio.bsky.social.
Great article! Excited to read parts 2 and 3
I too would watch Saturday Morning Slamball.
I follow F1 and while F1 has certainly achieved a short term sugar high in profitability, how well that (and the eyeballs) can be sustained is in serious doubt. Eventually it will have to deal with its own issues, that baseball thankfully doesn’t have:
–Extreme Competitive Imbalance: Since the start of 2013 there have been 210 F1 races. The top three factory teams have won 207. (The other three had something truly weird happen in them which facilitated the outsiders.)
–Unclear governance structure: threats of breakaways come and go; it’s not clear who controls expansion. The equivalent of the CBA, the Concorde Agreement, treats teams unequally.
–20-30% of the drivers are there simply because they come from wealthy families.
–Of the ten teams, at least two are full on “junior teams” where drivers have been called up to the Big Team midseason. And yet, expansion is looked at skeptically.
–Sportwashing: I concede this may never become an issue, and I agree it won’t until it suddenly does. If six races suddenly aren’t palatable to sponsors, look out: the competitive bidding might not be there for the other 18.
–F1 might have to deal with other political issues. Top of mind are the environmentalists.
It’s hard to believe, but 5-6 years ago F1 was looking at compelling the factory teams to run a third car each (teams always run two cars) to try and keep the grid size up. F1’s going really, really well right now. But as fast as that arrived, it could be gone in a pit stop.
Valid points! The differences between the two leagues and how that might influence the impact and sustainability of this type of approach is definitely something I plan to discuss in part 2!
to be fair, Ferrari is, uh, screwed. Liberty Media isn’t playing any of Bernie’s weird games, where the sport seemed to be run entirely to make him and his friends rich. Shareholder accountability is pretty good.
Concorde agreement is the way it is so the british teams couldn’t gang up and veto ferrari (and also a lot of graft and Ferrari bribing folks and other tifosi nonsense)
this has already been addressed with the cost cap (basically a salary cap) and will continue to be in the future.
Secondly its a bit disingenuous to say “3 teams have won 207 of 210 races” as basically Mercedes won like 90% of those races. It was really Merc being the most dominant team in history for 7 years.
third, this is nothing new. F1 has always been a couple teams dominating any given era.
lastly, F1 is an extremely engineering based sport and as such a team can go from absolutely unbeatable to 4th on the grid simply by not nailing car design or vice versa. Mercedes was largely seen as a joke before the 2014 season and then they won 7 Championships in a row by absolutely nailing the new engine and car regulations. And now under current regs they havent won a race in almost 2 years and Red Bull is lapping the field because they nailed the design this time.. Thats just the nature of the sport. Unless you make it a spec series, it will always be that way. Some team is going to get it really, really right and everyone is is going to be playing catchup for the next 4-5 years.
Almost all drivers are there because they have wealthy families (or sponsors). You cant get into racing otherwise. But I suspect you are talking about pay drivers which are not new at all but also not really a thing right now.. On the current grid though there is not really a single guy you could say is there purely because of money. Current F1 has more legit drivers than probably any time in its history. this is not an issue at all presently.
Again, just not true. No driver ever gets “called up midseason” except in very rare circumstance. Teams lend younger drivers out to other teams sometimes because they want them to get seat time (and they only have two seats) but correlating that with being a junior team is a huge leap.Its also not new.
(as someone who has been watching F1 for 35 years its a real trip to see it a level of popularity where its being discussed on fangraphs lol)
My existential question is “Why is Renault so bad, and why do they keep being so bad?” next to “what is it exactly that Ocon does?”
at least Toyota got out after having a terrible year. Renault/Alpine seems totally ok with not trying despite being a massive factory team
IDK man.
Stroll is a joke but his Daddy owns Tommy Hilfiger or whatever. Nice car this year but the year he beats a teammate is a year his teammate is is a coma.
Zhou, Tsunoda, and Sargeant are all there on money. Zhou, Tsunoda looked pretty bad last year vs. teammates. Drugovich (sp?) finished 100 pts ahead of Sargeant in F2 last year and he can’t get a ride.
At least Latifi and Mazepin are gone.
Red Bull flips drivers with Toro Rosso, the B-team.
Mercedes called Russell up when Lulu got the sniffles, then sent him back down to Williams. (Russell made it look pretty easy to drive that car. He is really talented.)
The cost cap isn’t real. Red Bull broke it and nobody cared. I don’t even really mind Red Bull breaking it because many other teams just quietly move their R&D expense over to the production sportscar side and no one can even tally it.
Stroll isnt a joke at all. He absoultey destroyed F3 and had two f1 podiums and a pole before his 21st birthday driving midfield cars. His teammates the past 2 seasons have had a combined 6 drivers championships so if “beating multiple champions” is your measuring stick, most drivers are a joke.
No, they arent. Tsunoda has been tagged as a future star since his debut in F3. And he is currently consistently finishing in or near the points in a car that is probably the worst on the grid. Saying he is there on money is ridiculous.
Zhou was criticized for being picked up simply for being Chinese but he very quicly proved that wasnt the case putting up a respectable rookie season in a not great car against a veteran teammate. And he is doing the same this year.
Sargent has been in 3 races and one he didnt even finish because De Vreis smashed into him. I have no idea how you can judge anything about him. Also who’s money is he bringing??
Well for starters they havent been called Torro Rosso for like 3 years now. But more to the point, no they dont. The last time they moved anyone from Alpha Tauri to Redbull was 2019. Thats also ONE team.
Yeah, see “very rare circumstance” I cited before. And Russel WAS a Mercedes driver. They lent him to Williams to get him racing time because they already had two drivers under contract at merc.
Well This is just pure conspiracy, tabloid BS I wont even bother to address. Its also not just the cost cap. They have introduced limits on wind tunnel time as well (higher finishing teams get less testing time, lower finishing teams get more)
This is the only accurate thing you have said. You don’t know.
Just because problems aren’t new or aren’t as bad as they used to be doesn’t mean they aren’t still problems that should be addressed.
I have no quarrel with the substance here — it’s well worth thinking about what baseball can do to reach new audiences as well as, you know, us — but I really wish we could dispense with this kind of vague doomsaying. (Also, no one has ever said “America’s Pastime” is the “title” of the sport. Calling baseball the national pastime was always just a bit of affectionate sportswriter hyperbole, whether its main competitors were boxing or horse racing as they once were or the NBA and NFL as they are now.)
In terms of total eyeballs and also in terms of eyeball-hours, baseball is still doing just fine. As always, it’s an uneven comparison between a 162-game season plus weeks of playoffs and something like F1 where there are no more than two dozen things to watch, total. Today’s media landscape is, if anything, more favorable to a sport with a committed hard core of fans who’ll soak it up in hundreds, not tens, of hours a year.
Similarly, I’ve always wondered if interest in the sport is impacted because after (or during?) every season, there’s always a lot of ‘baseball is broken and no one watches it’ articles.
I’m not really saying baseball is broken, so much as I’m saying baseball could do a better job of marketing its features instead of fixating on its bugs. My only allusion to its brokeness is with respect to the numbers MLB cares about (ratings, attendance, media rights deals, the average age of fans, etc.). Things could be better and that’s why they should put more effort into highlighting the positives, so I don’t think we’re actually too misaligned here.
No you’re def not, just a trend I’ve noticed
Yes, the owners and their representative the commissioner are indeed constantly complaining that their product doesn’t sell even better so that they could make even more money. But (a) we don’t have to help them out and (b) if they were less dumb, they’d realize that they’re only hurting themselves by doing so. One of baseball’s actual biggest problems right now is that the people who own and run the sport don’t seem to like the sport very much.
I agree that those trusted with the game don’t seem to like it that much, but I also think that for the past two decades, baseball has done a poor job of storytelling in general.
A baseball season, and particularly the stretch run, lends itself really well to long, tense drama – think “Summer of ‘41” or the 1995 Mariners run. In part because the regular season has been diluted, that no longer feels as dramatic. But even the Mets/Braves last year – that was a great storyline and it felt like it got short shrift.
The playoffs have their own brand of drama, especially when the two teams are historic rivals (one thing that made the 2004 Red Sox comeback even more special was the epic 2003 playoffs, and the fact that for two full seasons, the teams had played extremely evenly – the story built and built and built). But in terms of how the sport is discussed, it feels like those stories are lacking or maybe just aren’t told. Or maybe I’m on my niche stats sites that have tried to focus on data over narratives – but in my opinion narratives are what draw people in.
Anyway, long story, short, I appreciate Kiri focusing on this because a baseball season should be an epic storyline and I’d like to see more of it told that way.
I agree with this completely and I feel like it’d be an interesting investment of some marketing money for teams/owners who have a clue about the new media world, if there are any. I’d love to see a “team documentarian” kind of role given access to players and staff, and producing storyline segments throughout the year.
Love this article; agree wholeheartedly with the premise.
Also a big fan of Drive to Survive – hopefully there’s something similar the MLB can do. That being said, hopefully they also don’t just try to copy it – I think one of the things that made me hooked on the show is how small the world is – you need to learn about 10 teams and 20 drivers and after a few episodes you’re pretty much immersed in the entire F1 world.
But of course, the MLB can start by making their games not a hassle to watch if you’ve cut cable…
It should be noted that the default Thursday night football matchup is NOT Colts-Broncos. It is Jags-anyone. They played 14 of their 17 games on TNF last year I believe.
OK, maybe that’s hyperbole but only a little. Although once they started winnings games and featuring Trevor Lawrence and exciting players that people might want to actually watch, they are now on double-secret TNF probation. If they don’t get their act together soon they will be replaced by the Texans.
3rd most popular, maybe, although it’s questionable if basketball (like football) has truly surpassed baseball in popularity, but 4th? No way! Hockey and soccer still lag sificantly behind its popularity, and what else is there to mount a serious challenge? Golf? Tennis? Boxing? Auto Racing? Horse Racing? eSports? Nuh uh!
basketball’s ratings have halved in the past 3 years, it’s in really bad shape.
Given F1’s owners, I’d settle for Barve to survive. Or something.
I think people who worry about baseball are a little myopic. TV deals the world over are already declining, and baseball is way better off than other major sports in the united states outside of football. Baseball isn’t beating football right now, that’s fine, but they’re doing great compared to basketball and hockey. Basketball in particular is in real, real trouble.
Soccer is in a weird spot where the most watched league in the US is in Spanish. Maybe, eventually, Soccer in english surpasses Baseball but we’re talking in terms of decades, not 3-5 years.
Baseball’s biggest threat is the death of RSNs and those tv deals, which while a problem baseball has somewhat offset by investing very early in streaming. MLBAM is so far ahead of what other leagues are doing it’s genuinely impressive.
In terms of growth markets, the best potential growth market has to be Mexico. Baseball is already a huge deal in Latin America, and it could be a much bigger deal in Mexico proper. That being said, there’s probably a huge opportunity in growing the sport in Mexican communities in the states- there’s a reason Liga MX wants to play most of their games in LA. MLB does a great job with Spanish speaking populations in the US, but it could do a better job with Mexicans in particular.
How’s basketball in trouble? I usually see it discussed as a success in globalizing a brand
Look I understand that baseball could be doing things better but it is super hard to see them doing stuff like this to break even when ownership’s whole philosophy is to extract the most amount of money from the current fans at the expense of everything else. Growing the game is not on their agenda. They don’t even really seem to care that they’re losing younger generations. The current fans spend enough money—and they’re good enough at extracting money from them, either directly or indirectly—that their revenues are fine. They seem constitutionally incapable of making decisions collectively that will pay off 5 or 10 years down the line. Which is ironic because their teams baseball operations departments are very good at it.
DukeWinslow mentioned MLBAM as a major innovation that owners brought and that Mexico offers a great opportunity for growth. The rules changes seem to be met with universal applause. Your tirade aside, what else should owners be doing to grow the game?
But aren’t the rules changes aimed at increasing pace of play being made to better court younger and new fans while often being disliked by a lot of the existing fans?
There was a baseball show on Netflix called A Clean Sweep where a team of former KBO players played against high school and college players. It was entertaining if you can handle the Korean reality TV editing.
I tried to watch this during the offseason but it seemed to be approximately 3,000 hours long and I couldn’t handle the commitment. Is there a condensed version or a highlight reel or anything like that?
MLB: Drive to survive S1E01: Mike Trout gets a new truck. Anthony Rendon and Jo Adell discuss the settings for their fantasy baseball league.
F1 Drivers have these jetsetting/super luxurious lives (even though they are pretty gauche in a lot of ways), which is why a reality series based on their lives has such an appeal.
Many of my white collar/*dad* friends think golfers are just the coolest people ever. I don’t get it, but it’s a thing.
Baseball players have aspirational skills, and aspirational money but even super baseball fans aren’t that *interested* by their lives.
I’d watch a show where Zach Grienke coaches little league though.
I would watch a show with random MLBers doing mundane tasks, but I am in the minority.
Ep1: Jesse Winker takes his truck in for emissions testing
Ep2: Going to Walgreens to get a script filled and Old Navy to buy some new chinos with Mark Canha
Ep3: Merrill Kelly reorganizes his closet then heads to Whataburger
Ep4: Joey Votto mops, drives a school bus, plays chess
In the early 2000s Mike Mussina unexpectedly showed up in a documentary about doing crossword puzzles. It was the closest I came to liking a Yankee in years.