MLB: Surviving and Thriving
Previously on MLB:Drive to Survive, the first part of this three-part series on growing engagement with the sport via content beyond live games: we enumerated a few of the different types of supplementary media the league and teams might use to awaken interest in dormant fans and highlighted the potential benefits of doing so based on what has worked well for other sports. Since executing a game plan is just as important as the game plan itself, here in Part II, the conversation will shift to what makes supporting content effective.
For every individual, different aspects of sports resonate and keep them returning game after game. In a 2022 Ted Talk, Kate Fagan argued that the many things that give sports their gravity organize themselves into one of two categories: stakes and storylines. “This is what burns at the center of sports. In the Olympics, we have all agreed: a gold medal matters. Same with the World Cup. And now paired with these agreed-upon stakes, we also have even deeper storytelling. Which is how we end up teary-eyed after a three-and-a-half minute NBC vignette about a Romanian gymnast.”
Content designed to drive interest in a sport needs to tell a story and emphasize the stakes. Compelling stories contain developed and dynamic characters, several coats of conflict, and settings with character arcs of their own. Good stories are crafted with precision; they make us feel, contain universal truths, teach us things we didn’t know and didn’t realize we were missing. They meet us where we are.
All of the above exist in the game of baseball, but new fans may struggle to notice when watching a game for the first time. That’s where complementary content comes in.
Revisiting the Good Sport podcast, referenced in Part I, sports journalist Jessica Smetana detailed her journey to F1 fandom via Drive to Survive. “It’s still a little surreal because I’ve always liked the same sports since I was five years old. You know, football, basketball, hockey, baseball, soccer, tennis. That’s pretty much it.”
The podcast’s host, Jody Avirgan, noticed a familiar pattern to Smetana’s story: “The sports we watch, they’re often the sports that are with us as kids. We played basketball growing up or we went to a game with a parent and then boom, we are adults and we are diehard NBA fans.” Smetana isn’t alone. As Daniel Wann, a psychologist who studies sports fandom at Murray State University, said in an interview with The Atlantic, “The best predictor of being a sports fan as an adult is having played that or another sport as a child.” Yet F1 managed to capture tens if not hundreds of thousands of new adult fans that no childhood connection to the sport.
It’s not just that Drive to Survive exists; it’s that the show tells stories and tells them well. Though the first two articles of this series focus heavily on the show and similar docu-series, it’s only because they provide examples of the critical components of storytelling and the levels of support, access, and exposure needed to reach new fans. I’m not arguing for MLB to produce a carbon copy of these existing works, but rather that the league take the components and make them their own.
It doesn’t need to be a docu-series, and it doesn’t need to be on Netflix; it doesn’t even need to be video. It just needs to be a good story. As the famous saying goes, “There’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s.” Why? Because no matter how you go about it, you’re always eating a Reese’s. It’s a carefully curated product with a coordinated cadre of ingredients, calibrated to the correct quantity. (Though not the most delicious way to eat a Reese’s, my favorite trick is popping out the peanut butter center, yielding a halo of crunchy chocolate in its wake.)
So what are the chocolate, peanut butter, and vegetable oil of a good story? Characters, tension, and a little bit of delicious, fatty fluff to bring it all together.
Spencer Hall, Smetana’s co-host on their F1 podcast, described how Drive to Survive incorporated these crucial ingredients: “It did what I think every sort of great form of storytelling does, which is it focused on characters more so than the outcomes. They didn’t have access to the best teams, but they made drama out of who they could talk to. And it just so happens, if you do that and combine it with cars that go 200 miles [per] hour and can drive on the top of the Monte Carlo tunnel, that’s a pretty compelling product.”
Baseball certainly has characters fueling drama. Its version of cars topping 200 mph is pitchers pumping baseballs 100-plus mph and hitters cranking those same balls even harder, forcing defenders to endanger their bodies in the act of fielding. MLB hasn’t made it to Monte Carlo, but it does take place in stadiums enriched by ocean vistas, green monsters, and Fernando Rodney hiding in the trees.
Avirgan pointed out that the details highlighted by Hall are “the kind of factoid you might not pick up on if you just tuned in to watch a race; you might only see cars going round and round and flip the channel. But if you’ve seen Drive to Survive, you understand what you’re seeing. You have some backstory. They’ve translated the sport for you and walked you right up to the edge of real-life fandom.” In a matter of hours, an aspiring fan can get fully caught up on all the lore within the league’s universe.
During the first season alone, viewers learn how a handful of drivers went from teenage dreams to dark horse contention and get the backstory on rivalries not only between teams but also within. At one point, Kevin Magnussen offers Nico Hulkenberg an unappetizing snack suggestion like the world’s least helpful Pinterest board, all during a live interview on Danish television. Meanwhile, the show introduces the array of race tracks, many of which feel more like locations for destination weddings than venues for a corporate sporting event. Crucially, the series also seizes upon the opportunity to educate newcomers on the technical intricacies of the sport, but in such a seamless way that they don’t feel spoken down to.
As Hall noted, “There’s a lot of teaching you how to watch a race involved in Drive to Survive; if you’d never watched a race before, you can pick out the cruxes, you can pick out the points of trauma. Like, our tires aren’t working right. Like the driver is sick, right? It’s hot, it’s cold, it’s rainy, whatever. You could pick out a real basic how-to-watch from just watching Drive to Survive.” Other sports have taken a more targeted approach to education, creating broadcasts specifically geared toward educating and enticing children. The NFL has aired three games on Nickelodeon, complete with slime graphics in the endzones, and for the past two seasons has aired NFL Slimetime, a weekly highlight show that’s basically Sportscenter meets All That. Likewise, ESPN took advantage of its Disney ties to air a live-animated NHL game in the style of Big City Greens.
While the flashy approach works for kids, Hall finds it crucial to Drive to Survive’s effectiveness that they kept it subtle. “They need to think like a video game designer. They need to go, ‘How do I teach you how to press A, press B, and to uh, look around with the joystick,’ right? Without really being overt about it.”
Baseball suffers from the bitterness generated in fans that feel nerds have taken over the sport and did so in an abrasive know-it-all fashion. Nevertheless, the sport isn’t getting any simpler, and the associated stats and jargon build a high barrier to entry. Some individual broadcasts sprinkle in statistical nuggets (as I write, I’m listening to Arizona’s broadcast explain hard-hit rate). ESPN periodically simulcasts a Statcast Edition of their broadcast, which attempts to educate the analytically curious and cater to the data diehards. But it’s safe to say there’s no unified curriculum, and without one, statistical concepts are easily misrepresented and misinterpreted. An entertainment product provides a palatable opportunity to bust myths, ease analytical anxiety, and soften the landing as newcomers parachute into the sport.
All fandoms require a point of entry, and typically sports fandoms come with a mentor to coax us through the early phases. Without a parent to guide us through the early stages, adults need a different form of mentorship. In the case of F1, Drive to Survive provided that for a North American audience without many other resources. An MLB Drive to Survive, though, could serve as a life preserver in a tempest sea of options. Though I grew up around the sport of baseball, I didn’t start watching MLB until I reached my 20s and moved to Baltimore for grad school in 2012. Previously, I hadn’t lived near an MLB team and didn’t have an efficient way of catching up on the lore the way fans of Formula 1 do now. So I dove straight into the deep end: watching daily, attending games, finding baseball people to follow on Twitter, reading articles all day during my summer internship, and later discovering a myriad of podcasts. It took time that not every potential fan is willing to devote.
Even with all of that, and already knowing the mechanics of the sport, I still feel like it took a couple of seasons before I felt knowledgeable about professional baseball. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy baseball throughout the process, but I did need to know some players and context before I really began to care. I needed to hear quotes about amusement park rides from Buck Showalter, and watch J.J. Hardy play his steady brand of defense, and soak up the ambiance of Camden Yards, and marvel at the ability of Adam Jones to blow bubbles while scaling the centerfield wall, and learn about top draft pick Manny Machado’s rapid ascent through the minors and experience the thrill of his debut. I needed stories.
In a recent podcast discussion about the first-round matchups in the NBA playoffs, ESPN analysts Bomani Jones and Domonique Foxworth worked through what makes them care about some series more than others. Jones posited that the NBA has “tried to turn this into an action movie above all else. Right? Lots of explosions. Their whole thing is points. People want points. Points. Points. Points. So crashes, explosions, pow, pow, pow.” But he believes there’s more nuance — that fans care about both style and substance. “People don’t enjoy sports because it’s an action movie. They enjoy it because it’s a drama.”
Foxworth built on that idea with the Sacramento Kings in mind. The Kings’ last playoff appearance came in 2006; since then they’ve been a double feature of anonymous and irrelevant. A playoff berth this year earned them some relevance, but they remain largely anonymous. For Foxworth, “[The NBA is] a character drama, and you’ve gotta know the characters.” We see a similar effect in baseball with the Rays, who churn their roster so continuously that each postseason appearance turns up a new cast of characters. As he puts it: “The characters matter, and it’s not necessarily that they have to be super famous, but they have to have something about them that’s distinctive. Because otherwise it doesn’t matter.” He further contended that the Kings aren’t distinguishable. “We just meeting them. Y’all just got added in on season 4. You’re an introductory character. You gonna die in the first scene.” And while it’s true that the nature of the playoffs demand that someone take the Drew Barrymore role in Scream, even Casey Becker got some character development before she ruined that batch of popcorn.
Football, as much as just about any sport, puts the action front and center, but it doesn’t market itself as strictly an action movie. I watched all five episodes of the most recent season of Hard Knocks as part of my “research” for this piece and came away shocked to find myself emotionally invested in the Lions despite going into the show with zero ties to Detroit and a general distaste for head coach Dan Campbell.
As the show aired, Campbell became a folk hero. Social media lit up in support of a man with a personal vendetta against kneecaps. He generally presents with the vibe of a man who snorted a line of Bucked Up pre-workout, chopped down an aged oak tree with no power tools, whittled the trunk into a lance, and used it for a quick round of dirt bike jousting — all of which is a level of macho sports bravado that’s a bit much for me. In the first episode of Hard Knocks, he delivers a motivational speech to the team with similar gusto, but something else about it struck me: He seems genuinely overcome with raw emotion. Typically, tough guy showmanship masks true emotion, but Campbell used it to display earnest vulnerability. Call me a Campbell convert.
Later in the episode, running back Jamaal Williams breaks down the huddle to wrap up the first day of camp. As I watch, I’m sure another overwrought motivational speech is coming, and it does. But while I believe the passion behind Williams’ words, that’s not the part that touched me. It was this specific line:
“If you gonna piss like a puppy, stay on the porch and let the big dogs eat.”
As a writer, I’m a sucker for a metaphor. He could have said, “It’s time to grow up,” or “We need to hit that next level,” but no. He hit us with the puppy piss line, and it worked so much better. I love him for that.
We all form attachments to characters and stories and places based on our individual experiences and preferences. I know some folks loved Campbell’s knee-cap-biting energy from the jump. Maybe someone else latched onto the story about David Blough and his wife Melissa González, an Olympic runner. Others might draw energy from the offensive and defensive coordinators trash-talking one another nonstop during intrasquad scrimmages. What’s important is having something to latch onto. I thought I was apathetic to the action presented by the lowly Lions on the field. It turns out I just needed to hear their stories.
Plenty of people do incredible work telling baseball’s stories — everyone on this website, for example. Even data enthusiasts are using data to tell a story. Looking at the video format, there exist a ton of great YouTubers producing video essays: Secret Base, Foolish Baseball, Jomboy, Baseball Doesn’t Exist, Sport Storm, Stark Raving Sports, Baseball Historian, etc., etc., etc. Players such as Julio Rodríguez and Mookie Betts post behind-the-scenes looks into their training and daily routines, or stream on Twitch like Trevor May. Teams like the Giants post drills for aspiring big leaguers dreaming of the stories their futures may hold; the Cubs post extended versions of between-innings entertainment to showcase player personalities. Don’t even get me started on the myriad of podcasts available. The internet holds tons of quality content for those willing to go find it.
But the people MLB wants to reach — the ones who know baseball exists but haven’t felt the urge to check it out — need as little friction as possible between themselves and what will hopefully be the spark that ignites an obsession. They’re not going to spend hours playing roulette with the YouTube algorithm or testing out different writers and podcasters. They need it to show up in the Trending Now section on Netflix or under the For You banner on HBO Max. They need it to show up where they live, looking all shiny and produced, with exclusive team access to enhance the character development and narrative oomph and a manageable level of commitment. Ten episodes, 30 minutes a pop, devour it in a weekend. After that, you’re all caught up on the lore and ready to enjoy baseball.
Much of the existing storytelling in baseball uses some of the ingredients, but not all. Peanut butter without chocolate. Chocolate without peanut butter. Still delicious, but not the same. Or the stories do have all the components, but potential fans can’t find it, or it’s too long, or not long enough, or lacks presentation.
Player and team YouTube channels provide exclusive access and high quality production but need more meaningful narratives and are unlikely to be discovered by anyone other than existing fans. Likewise, player development groups for many organizations have begun marketing their minor leaguers via social media, which effectively generates hype and hope for the future big league club. But again, while drawing you behind the curtain is a plus, it’s unlikely that anyone other than existing fans will find those feeds. Meanwhile, those trained in crafting narratives weave works of art across a variety of mediums but tend to lack the type of access and platform needed to transcend the sport’s existing bubble and reach mainstream pop culture.
The context surrounding Formula 1’s mainstream ascent in the U.S. certainly differs from that of baseball, suggesting that even if MLB produced its own Drive to Survive and found a suitable platform to partner with, the results would not compare. Like the NFL, F1 races happen just once a week, and they typically air on Sunday mornings, before football starts for the day and with little other competition for eyeballs. The events themselves are fast-paced and strategic yet still at risk for chaos fueled by human error. MLB, on the other hand, plays a 162-game season, competing with other primetime programming, and while it strives to feature many of the same characteristics of F1, it failed to do so for long enough that it forced a wave of rule changes to rewind a few concerning trends.
F1 brought in fans with little to no prior awareness of the sport in a country where few of their live events occur. Their market saturation started at zero, leaving nowhere to go but up. There’s no way that a similar show about baseball would double the sport’s viewership and attendance. But it doesn’t need to. Despite a general public distracted by a deluge of entertainment options, the sport still posts strong revenue and local ratings. Compare MLB to its closest competition: the NBA. Sunday Night Baseball pulls in similar ratings to nationally broadcast NBA games, both checking in around 1.6 million. Likewise, the World Series and the NBA Finals both drew around 12 million viewers.
Competing with other sports may not be the best framing of the actual goal, though. The true goal is growing the sport and producing the best possible product for the fans. Given all the appropriate cultural and technological context, baseball and MLB are doing well. The sport has already survived over a century, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t continue in that manner. But while baseball isn’t dying, that doesn’t mean we can’t improve its quality of life.
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.
This is an outstanding, deeply considered series — thanks, Kiri. Similarly to “Drive to Survive,” it was the TV series “The Ultimate Fighter” that propelled the UFC to spectacular new heights, and it did so by telling human stories (about prospects, not champions) while subtly teaching viewers the intricacies of MMA. But I agree with you that TV shows aren’t necessarily the point — In this age of the smartphone and QR code, everybody’s holding a literal portal into supplementary content that can and should emphasize the stories at the heart of the sport.
Thank you for writing this. It’s interesting and definitely a necessity for mlb to take some steps to *try* this, but there’s a huge problem: there are so many fewer true characters than there used to be. The majority of US American ball players fit one of two molds: rich kid who got funneled to super travel teams at a young age, and bible thumpers that fit a very similar, often very boring, mold. The idealized form of this player is Bryce Harper, and no other player will be more of Bryce than he is. but really, they’re all just weaker versions of his story (and I love Bryce because of his narrative arc).
So where then do you turn for characters? To the DR? Well, those guys often have even *less* opportunity to develop storylines. If they’re in academies by the time they’re 12, they really can’t form a unique arc, one that’s dramatically different than the next DR kid. Cubans definitely have great stories (moncada even has mystery around his story), as do players from much less common places to find baseball success.
My point is that there’s a massive plague of homogeneity taking over baseball. The blandness of uniform paths to the big leagues is exacerbated by what taking place on the diamond, in our brave new post-moneyball world. It’s simply not as compelling narratively as it once was: the point is for it to be predictable. this is, to some extent, literally the point of this website: to destroy narratives and remind us that those are little more than our monkey brains making something out of nothing. Any aspirations we have for a team that isn’t good on paper , fangraphs reminds us, is nothing more than idealism. Any player who might not have what it takes, is projected away from ever being able to prove us wrong. Often, when a player DOES prove us wrong, fangraphs says “let’s look at the adjustments”, effectively removing any of the magical “drive to thrive” that the player may have had. I think David laurilas articles are fangraphs trying to correct for this a little bit, but, those are just band aids, and honestly, I usually just end up thinking about how homogenous the path to the mlb is when I read them (“in college my coach taught me this.” Or, “I added more movement to this pitch when I heard about this thing because I started learning about statcast”). It’s a sad state of affairs, and one that I bemoan often. Only players like arraez (no EV) and Luis Robert (no patience) seem like true outliers with dramatically different approaches worth telling stories about.
This lack of personality and narratives in baseball has actually led me to soccer, which is rich with both. Teams have to work as a unit, and there’s no way to quantify it. This means that the players inherently develop narratives with one another, their manager, fans, because they need to be human, not just numbers. This is what I find myself craving most from sports. And outside of October, baseball rarely provides it.
This argument doesn’t make sense because in F1 everyone is an uber rich kid that was funneled into driving at a young age, but the series is still entertaining nonetheless.
One way that occurs to me to get around this (which I agree is a bit of a problem) is focusing more on the guys who haven’t made it yet. How would it be if they put a reality-TV spin on guys in the minors? Who gets the callup? Who flounders at AAA and how do they deal with it? Check in next week…
This is kinda erasing the Latin American players and their culture, which is a big part of baseball and its fandom!
This is nonsense because the NFL players are the same. Watch the draft next week and every kid is a poor kid who overcame difficulties or a nepo baby rich kid with every opportunity.
But somehow, the NFL isn’t lacking stories about making both those lives interesting. We like Jalen Hurts even though I can’t tolerate hearing how his dad was a coach another time. We tear up when a 330 pound offensive lineman tells us how hard his life is because his grandfather passed away when he was young and it was his dream to see his grandson get drafted in the 1st round and yada yada.
Everyone’s story is unique and interesting, even the people you drive by every day at work…if you tell the story well. Fernando Tatis is a rich former player’s son – his story may SOUND boring, but it doesn’t have to be.
You sound like you don’t enjoy story telling.
DTS has obviously been a huge success but its also gets way more credit than it probably should. F1 was an absolutely massive worldwide sport for decades, just not in North America. The rabid fanbase and huge interest was always there. What has really changed F1’s success is it being finally pried from Bernie Ecclestone’s cold, nearly dead hands and put into the hands of someone who actually wants to capitalize on that popularity.
F1 under Ecclestone almost took delight in not catering to fans and being as un-fun as possible. He once said he didnt want poor people watching it (i’m paraphrasing but not much). Liberty Media (The new F1 owners and owners of the Braves FYI) has really just taken the lowest hanging fruit that should have been done years ago. Like, it sounds insane but F1 didnt even really use its youtube channel until like 2018.
EDIT: Just to hammer the point home
LOLLLOLOLOL. WHAT A QUOTE! Thank you SGB for that excellent post
The point of F1 to Bernie was to get him and the team owners as personally rich as possible, as easily as possible. This was often accomplished in ways that would get the managers of publicly traded companies thrown in prison. F1 was a walking FCPA case.
The point of F1 to Liberty Media is to maximize shareholder value without going to jail, and it’s VERY different as a result (a lot fewer weird races in some central Asian hellhole, a return to a heavily European calendar, etc. etc.)
Also Bernie gets segmentation and segment value a lot better than a lot of MBAs.
This is just PsychoBabble.
First of all, the F1 comparison is just silly. Everyone drives.
Secondly? Baseball is doing just fine. Attendance-wise, $$$-wise.
Plain ol’ PsychoBabble.
Well, F1 did get a new $75million a year deal from ESPN. Maybe MLB could shoot for that.
Why would anyone care about the rich getting richer? How is selling out a positive thing? I don’t know anything about F-1 but I know that signing a deal with ESPN makes your product worse and the people own the brand richer. This is just all part of the larger cylce of de-emphaszing the actual game of baseball. The on-field baseball is all that matters. More parasites make something less healthy.
MLB’s poor marketing can be summed up in this conversation with my wife, who has no interest in sports. What sport did Mickey Mantle play, baseball; Lebron James, basketball; Tom Brady, football; Mike Trout, who’s Mike Trout?
I’ll bet she has heard of Ken Griffey Jr. Mike trout is great but there are a lot of reasons why he is not Tom Brady or Lebron James. Those guys are not household names because of marketing. MLB is busy tearing itself apart – has been for 20 years. They are still rich and doing great.
They could also stop alienating all of their actual fans with endless rule changes and a complete lack of direction – that might work too. Or they could, you know, do nothing and sit back and get rich too.
You mean the rule changes that have been well received and are making the game faster and more watchable, to near-universal delight?
MLB needs to expand into other cities. Kids in Portland, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Nashville, Charlotte, and Montreal should be the target audience.
Plus the league could probably get $2 – 4 Billion per expansion team in franchise fees. Depth for the haves is at an all time high, the have nots don’t want to spend no matter how many teams exist. Adding expansion teams would thin the depth of the top teams through competition for draft picks and rule 5/waiver claims.
I think we can quibble about the locations but it’s remarkable how MLB doesn’t see the importance of this. There’s something to be said for capturing overall market share and how it builds off of itself. But all teams can see is another 6 franchises that the Yankees and Dodgers and Mets will subsidize, decreasing their own take.
I think the point about characters and the Rays is pretty relevant. It matters to be good, but you have to be good and recognizable. The Astros’ brand is Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve; the Rays’ brand is that they’re constantly crying poor and so they get rid of players when they hit arbitration. Who wants to root for a team like that? Hopefully that will change with Wander Franco sticking around for a while but that’s been its MO for a while now.
This is why I am very skeptical of what Chaim Bloom is doing with the Red Sox, and why signing Rafael Devers was something they had to do. The Red Sox had a brand with Betts and Bogaerts and Devers and now two-thirds of them were gone. While you cannot just blindly give out huge contracts to your stars because they can go bad (like, does anyone think the Rays would have been better off signing David Price to a $200M deal?) you also cannot trade everyone either.
Well that’s the fundamental tension: “smart” baseball is not fan friendly. The rays are the zenith of modern baseball, and FSG wants to replicate their success in Boston. It’s got no soul, but that doesn’t matter
This is inevitable in everything really. Once people learn how to optimize something it becomes less fun/entertaining because the optimal way is rarely the fun way.
If you want a good example, look into esports. Especially first person shooters because the progression is 1000x faster than traditional sports. Since they can basically just play the game 12 hours a day, everyday the elite top players figure out the optimal way to play the game (called the meta) in what seems like weeks and the creators constantly have to change/add characters and generally rebalance things to keep it fresh.
Of course. But I’ve seen it reported that bill James was the trailblazer who led to this happening all across the board. So baseball was the first to be ruined, and is therefore more far gone than other sports / parts of the economy.
And this is why I believe strongly in regulation, in sports and all things. We need ways to defend against this horrific model of efficiency first. Otherwise we have a world of Amazon and TTO.
I would argue basketball is struggling with a “meta” even more than baseball, actually. 3s or die; midgame is dead and basketball fans have long bemoaned how poorly defense is played at the highest level.
I don’t agree about the Rays. Arozarena, for example, has a literal movie being planned about him and it’s entirely based on his crazy postseason. They still have that dude.
Baseball suffers from unimaginative and often parochial management–and that starts with Manfred and Clark. Adding to that are competition issues…not just between big market and small, but between willingness to make an effort and designed to lose with the lowest possible payroll. Those two are intertwined, but contempt for the fans shows up in every game when a AAA roster is being rolled out.
It’s a lot easier to tolerate 17 games in a tanking NFL season than 162 in a tanking MLB season.
Love the discussion. I’ve been thinking the last few years that MLB is focusing it’s resources on rule changes but it’s really their marketing that sucks.
I will say, counter to my belief, that the pitch clock does make the games more generally watchable. Enough about that.
MLB fails to market itself as a single entity and it’s a problem. All the individual clubs operate on their own as far as broadcasting rights. It’s archaic and a disaster. There’s SO many media/broadcast/viewing opportunities with today’s technology, if they’d just take control of their own product. Any team, anywhere, on any device, remove blackouts, should be a priority.
The 162 game season isn’t compelling to the average person. I love baseball and tradition but let’s be honest, they’ve altered base sizes, added a pitch clock, they’ve moved on from tradition. 150 games or less, with an expanded play-off could be a start.
You REALLY have to try to have all the teams competitive. Having teams call themselves a pro team but fielding a minor league roster should not be acceptable.
I’ll agree with your article and with a few of the other commenters. Yes, you need to build a story and yes, the majority of the game is kind of cookie cutter. All the teams are basically trying to do the same thing; hit home runs and strike batters out. Stories need personalities, contrasting styles, roles and compelling characters. Baseball needs guys that steal bases, it needs guys to TRY and hit for AVG, it needs roles. It needs a few pitchers that throw complete games, it needs Iron men that play every day. It’s become too much an analytical endeavor. It needs teams that are built around pitching and defense, some power clubs, and some lineups that are hard to strike out. Teams need more contrast. In an unpopular opinion, I actually think the payroll discrepancies and big/small market thing is good for baseball (there’s a balance though that should be there between being non-trying uncompetitive vs. just not very good)
Most of all it needs to market it’s actual product, the PLAYERS of social media, TV, streaming platforms, etc.
The stakes part is where I think baseball can have trouble connecting with potential fans. A majority of baseball games are low-stakes, in the sense of leading to a championship, and for many, we don’t know the stakes at the time — that game you drop to a division rival in April might be the thing that keeps you out of a playoff spot, but we won’t know that for six months.
The individual games themselves can have drama and storylines, but stakes are hard to fully explain, especially early in the season.
Think about it in a non-sports context: if there was a TV show that ran 162 episodes a season, you probably wouldn’t stress too much about missing a single episode, figuring that you probably won’t miss a lot that you can’t fill in later. But a show that’s only running 10, 12, 16, 20 episodes has to advance a plot faster, and missing individual episodes will mean you miss a lot.
This plea for more “content” is, I’m sorry to say, fairly contentless. I fervently hope the writer is not under the impression that this is meaningful:
I begin to feel, after reading both installments of this series, that there is a fairly deep category mistake behind them — misidentifying a problem of marketing as a problem of “storytelling” because that is how marketers market themselves. There’s nothing really narratological going on here, and the threadbare Joseph Campbell universalist nostrums are just misplaced.
The thing you’re actually asking here is for MLB to make better TikToks and streaming docuseries. This is a matter of where they spend their marketing dollars — something I 100% agree they are bad at! — and has nothing much to do with Rob Manfred’s understanding of The Hero With a Thousand Faces for Dummies.
I agree with this. Storytelling is crucial to each baseball game as it’s being broadcast — Vin Scully was the master of letting the story unfold while augmenting it with context — but marketing the entire sport as a docudrama isn’t something in which I’m interested. Yes, there’s a vital storytelling element to any sport. No, I don’t want the stories to become the focus. That’s the WWE.
Maybe young people do want to watch sporty soap operas; I don’t know. But for me, the stories don’t drive my interest, the competition does. Judging by the ESPN-ification of sports in recent years, maybe I’m an old man yelling at clouds meme, here.
When half the teams are out of competition by the end of May (and half of those teams were out before the season even started) you cant really hang your hat solely on the competitive aspect for a season that lasts 162 games. I’m a Royals fan and competitiveness went out the window 4 weeks ago. I’m watching to see how Witt and Pasquatino progress. To see if Bubic has made adjustments etc etc. AKA: Stories.
Its definitely not just “young people”. You just have to look at the McGwire/Sosa battle (or even Judge last year) to see that everyone will tune in for a great story
Right, I’m a Royals fan too, so I definitely understand. I don’t feel like we’re disagreeing, though. Those are exactly the types of stories Vin Scully would talk about during a broadcast.
I remember when Ernesto Frieri was warming up several years ago, Vin told the audience about how in his youth he had built up the strength in his arm by cranking out corn tortillas for his family’s business. That’s a great human interest story that adds to the product. Same thing with Bubic working in the off-season to change his repertoire. These are stories that augment the viewing experience. They’re stories that (hopefully) have an effect on wins down the road.
The McGwire-Sosa story line is a better example of the slippery slope that I’m talking about. If the league prioritizes entertainment for its own sake they might lose sight of the fact that the thing I find entertaining — watching fierce competition within the framework of a rule set — isn’t the same thing as what the people they’re trying to draw to the stadiums and screens find entertaining.
As an example, I grew up playing and watching a lot of basketball. But over the past couple decades, I’ve lost interest. As usual, there are a lot of reasons why, but a big one is that it’s clear that the people in charge of the NBA don’t care about what I care about. There was the scandal with the referees that was essentially heaped onto the back of a single scapegoat and mostly forgotten. Once you lose the pretense of a league that is at least *trying* to create somewhat fair competition, I’m not interested. NBA headlines now compared to 20+ years ago seem to resemble TMZ and the WWE more, with feuds and scandals and the like. Much of it is just the result of living with social media, ubiquitous sousveillance, etc. — and a lot of people do love those aspects! Pro wrestling and TMZ are quite popular. But that’s not what I like at all! It’s possible that MLB could become more popular by leaning into those trends. People, as they do with the NBA, would likely say, “Relax, it’s just entertainment, after all.”
Yes, but what I find entertaining is watching a sport that isn’t always governed and marketed for maximum entertainment value!
It’s not always an either/or proposition. I love the WBC with all its emotion and storylines — the pure joy and tension is unmatched. But that’s because everyone involved cares so much. It’s entertaining because the competition feels real.
Basically, I believe it’s possible for a sport to concentrate on creating compelling entertainment to the ultimate detriment of the things that I enjoy most. Maybe I’m not expressing myself as clearly as I might, but it’s an idea worth considering, I think.
I am really enjoying your writing, Kiri. I grew up in Asia in the 90s/2000s, during the long reign of Michael Schumacher and Ferrari. F1 was everywhere and was appointment viewing every weekend during the season.
So I agree — once you know what’s going on, with the formula rules on engines, tires, aerodynamics, etc, and all the intricacies of racing — it’s excellent sport to watch. (Also, Grand Prix might be one of the greatest sports films I’ve ever watched on the big screen. Mesmerizing!)
Looking forward to the next article!
Thanks! This is a great series.
US:F1::Europe:MLB
I think there are certain challenges to the approach of some DTS-like thing for an American audience that already has many die-hard baseball fans (though not as many as it once did) that may not make such a program a compelling option (although the broader points you made do hold). The die-hard fans actually revolt against some reductive storylines. As someone familiar with F1 before DTS, I found some of the narratives laughably forced, and I haven’t kept up with the show. My F1 fandom has waned slightly, though that’s more to do with the off-track politics than anything else. But the DTS reference does hold for potentially entering new markets.
Baseball consumes a miniscule market share in places like Germany or Italy, perhaps even less than F1 had in the US pre-DTS. I don’t know the details, but having spent a decent chunk of time in different parts of Europe, I’ve literally never seen baseball on TV or in a newspaper or anything, though I think in the UK, you can maybe get it on some very expensive SkySports package. But this challenge is actually one that has to be overcome before a DTS-like marketing strategy can be effective.
The Product Has to be Available: Global Soccer’s US Market Entry
I grew up playing soccer in the 90s and early 00s, and when I stopped playing, I grew hungry to watch, but soccer in the 00s was hard to find. Unless you had a souped-up cable package (which my parents did not), the only soccer on basic cable was the Champions League on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons at 2:45. It kicked off before school ended. Gradually (ESPN took one game a week starting in ~2008) and then all at once (NBC made every game available in 2013), the Premier League became widely accessible in the US. I was the weird who was finding a Scottish pub to go watch games at 7:45 in the morning on a Saturday, but it’s no surprise that most people weren’t like me, and it wasn’t until several years into NBC’s coverage that soccer fandom took off.
The Premier League is probably better today than any of the other leagues in Europe, but it wasn’t that way at this point in time. After Manchester United and Chelsea played in 2008 Champions League final, Spain became the dominant country of European football (2008 Euros, 2010 WC, 2012 Euros), plus Barca winning the UCL in 2009, 2011, and 2015 and Madrid winning it in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018. La Liga could have capitalized on this success and having the two greatest players of the era (Messi and Ronaldo) by getting the product in front of American eyeballs, but they didn’t. They signed a more lucrative (short-term financially speaking) contract with BeIN sports, which was in some absurdly small fraction of American households. They had the better product on the field, but made a terrible media rights decision, and the result is, hispanohablante communities aside, the EPL has way more fans today.
Baseball needs to find a way to get itself onto European TV sets. While 7 pm EDT first pitches are never going to be a great option, the afternoon games should be viable options at European waking hours. Make the Cubs Europe’s team. (I mean, please don’t do that; I’m a Pirates fan; the Cubs have enough fans already. But it makes sense). Make sure that there’s one game every day that takes place during European waking hours, and broadcast it for free. MLB already has its own delivery option, but I’m not sure fans are going to go out of their way to download MLBTV. It needs to be on major broadcasters. But surely, it would be a boon to DAZN or SkySports or Canal+ to be able to add in baseball games for free to their portfolios of offerings. It would be better on national channels (RAI, RTVE, etc.), but I’m not sure that’s realistic. In exchange for giving the product away for free, could MLB could get those networks to do the production in different languages?
Once the product is there, the storylines write themselves
There are already a few players of European background in MLB. Imagine 30:30-style clips about them. Or a series about the impact of Italians/Italian-American on MLB, that tracks the greats of the past all the way through the inheritors of that history today. The possibilities are nearly endless.
One thing I’m not seeing here- and it’s interesting Spencer is talking about this- is that baseball teams are local and tied to identity in a way that F1 teams really aren’t (at least in the US sense). DTS has kind of avoided talking about the Brit teams versus everyone else issues, or Max and the whole Dutch fan thing, but F1 doesn’t have the same kind of community ties in the states that really create long lasting fandom.
Fandom- especially college sports but some times baseball and depressingly, pro football- is identity relevant, and that’s a huge driver of value (there is nothing sadder than people for whom the Washington commanders or Cleveland browns are at the core of their identity). F1 has to do this stuff because it doesn’t have the same community levers that a local team does. Max Verstappen sure as hell has to pay for his drinks in Austin, and colt Mccoy never will.
Spencer isn’t gonna watch a documentary about Florida state or Notre Dame. I… well the Braves don’t really have a rival, but I’m gonna out my remote through the tv if they make me about the 90s Yankees. However I’ll stream the 93 FSU- ND football game on a potato,
This is a brilliant sentence: “Baseball suffers from the bitterness generated in fans that feel nerds have taken over the sport and did so in an abrasive know-it-all fashion.”
I find the accuracy and truthfulness of this statement enraging, but it explains a lot. I don’t think it’s just the fans though. There must be a majority of folks working in MLB and MLB orgs who are bitter about people who are good at math telling them how to win games. That’s the only way you get the inertia to move against a thing that’s been impacting the game for 20-plus years now. It’s the reason no one organization tried as a group to overcome the shift by changing its approach at the plate. It’s the reason MLB instead resorted to a rule change to thwart the geeks who demonstrated why shifting worked. Anti-innovation is the hallmark of organizations that struggle in any sector of the economy.
This explains why MLB insists on annoying its current fans in the laughable hope of attracting new ones who are familiar enough with the game to know they aren’t interested in the 162-game schedule no matter how intriguing the storylines are or how well the stories are told. I know at least one 20-something who played the game into high school and loved his Little League experience but will tell you that going from three hours, 20 minutes to three hours, doesn’t change anything for him. He’s still not watching until September. Putting some games on AppleTV isn’t going to make him watch either. It’s just going to frustrate fans who can’t see a game or have to buy yet another streaming service or navigate to a different platform to see a game. MLB hasn’t had a new thought about marketing since the invention of television.
If MLB really wanted to make changes for the better, it could move ahead with robo-umps that get calls correct, don’t hold grudges and don’t insist on their individualized versions of the strike zone. Or it could simply make umpires accountable for their efforts (or lack thereof). It could remove blackouts and make it easy for fans to see all the games at one affordably-priced streaming rate. It could require a base level of spending from all teams and further disincentivize the service time games teams like Pittsburgh play with top prospects.
Dugouts have been embracing fun this year all around. The Angel’s Samurai Helmet, the Mariners’ Trident, the Oriole’s…chugging. Marketing things like that isn’t happening at an MLB level very well, though.
Heck, even Diaz’s walk out Timmy Trumpet song wasn’t a very big deal outside Mets fans, and they had the dude play live at the stadium.
Local marketing is fine; every Cardinal fan loved Lars Nootbar far before he was actually good, and before the WBC made him huge worldwide because they just liked shouting “Nooooooot” when he came up to bat. And the team liked selling merch. No reason more things like that can’t reach larger scales.