No, Millennials Aren’t Killing Baseball
This is Ashley MacLennan’s fourth piece as part of her August residency at FanGraphs. Ashley is a staff writer for Bless You Boys, the SB Nation blog dedicated to the Detroit Tigers, and runs her own site at 90 Feet From Home. She can also be found on Twitter. She’ll be contributing regularly here over the next month. Read the work of all our residents here.
Since the beginning of his tenure as commissioner, Rob Manfred has made a concerted effort to address issues associated with pace of play and, more broadly, the appeal of the sport to fans. One of the main problems facing him? How to create a new generation of fans to keep the game alive and flourishing for years to come.
The issue, as many see it, is how to sell a game to a demographic composed largely of people who can barely look up from their phones long enough to cross the street, let alone sit in a stadium for three straight hours, watching the nuanced and, yes, sometimes slow game of baseball unfold before them?
There’s certainly an effort to connect with fans by means other than simple on-field action. Teams are attempting to tap into the younger fan base by offering promotions via the Ballpark app. Checking in at Guaranteed Rate Park for the first time? Go get yourself a free t-shirt. Visiting Camden Yards? Take a guided tour of the stadium and maybe win a commemorative print.
Gameday promotions seek to appeal to popular trends, with mixed results. The Tampa Bay Rays have recently featured a Fidget Spinner promo that was met with some sarcastic side-eyeing on Twitter, but their DJ Kitty onesie night was so popular fans around the world were begging for the item online, and those who didn’t get one of the 15,000 onesies were heartbroken, and frankly a little mad. (It’s worth noting average Rays attendance is 15,876, so this should have been enough onesies for almost the entire crowd.) That’s the sign of a popular promo — and of an organization successfully tapping into a cultural moment.
The presence of teams online is, in and of itself, an attempt to reach out to fans in this brave new digital era. The Twitter accounts of the Rays, Cleveland Indians, and Chicago Cubs, among others, frequently exchange witty banter with one another, share memes, or use gifs to start online fights. It’s engaging, entertaining, and infinitely retweetable.
Recently, when the Rays played a series in Houston, the immediacy of the internet was able to create one of the most memorable non-game moments of the season. Rays pitcher Chris Archer delivered a “Declaration of Unfriendliness” to plucky Astros mascot Orbit, himself known for a number of on-field shenanigans against opposing players. The prank war between Archer and Orbit escalated over the three-game series and was all documented online with photos and videos shared from the official team accounts, player accounts, and media personalities like Fox Sports Sun’s Alex Corddry (whose cell phone Orbit swallowed). Fans online loved it, media outlets covered it in depth, and for several days you couldn’t log onto Twitter without seeing it referenced.
Ryan Sheets, who runs the Rays’ social-media feeds, was quick to praise the Astros and both fanbases for the tremendous response that resulted from the Twitter battle.
There’s a lot to be said about importance of social media in modern baseball fandom. Through Twitter especially, fans are able to communicate directly with their favorite team, win prizes, get a game play-by-play when they’re unable to watch, and learn more about their teams’ players via Twitter takeovers and similar initiatives.
Likewise, a new app called Infield Chatter allows fans to view videos and photos from popular baseball stars without the clutter of anything other than baseball filling the feed. It’s clearly a new way to have players connect with their fans beyond the realm of the game, and establish more opportunities for baseball to reach out to a younger audience. If you can’t get them to put down their phones, find a way to put the game in front of them. Apps like Infield Chatter, MLB Ballpark, and MLB At Bat, put baseball right in a user’s hands.
But is it sufficient to establish an audience for the future?
Looking at television ratings, the answer would appear — at first glance, at least — to be “not really.” In a recent report, Sports Business Daily compared the 2017 season viewership of all 29 US-based MLB teams to the same time in the 2016 season and found that 18 of the 29 clubs had shown a decline. Last season, with all the election news drawing attention, a decline was expected (14 of 29 teams showed a decline), but this year, with no obvious outside distractions to blame, it would appear baseball’s television audience is shrinking.
On the surface, this might be alarming, but a deeper dive into the numbers shows an obvious trend: losing teams don’t maintain viewership. The 2015 World Series winning Kansas City Royals have slumped since their back-to-back postseason appearances, and the 37% decline in viewership makes sense. What’s interesting is that the Royals are, overall, still the highest-rated team overall. People are watching. In Los Angeles, where the Dodgers are having one of the best seasons in baseball history, viewership is up 24%, but because local fans have a nightmarish time being able to watch the games locally, the Dodgers are still in the bottom five of overall viewership. The problem here, it seems, isn’t an unwillingness to watch, but rather providing easy access for fans to be able to.
Another positive sign for viewership is the recent ratings from the 2017 MLB Home Run Derby, which drew in 8.2 million viewers, surpassing viewership of the NFL Pro Bowl and the NBA All-Star Game. There’s clearly an audience ready to watch, provided there’s something they want to see.
What about fans in the parks, though? Well, again, there’s a lot to be said for a winning team. It should come as no surprise that the Dodgers come out on top here, with an average game attendance of 45,623, and close to 3 million fans visiting the park already this year. The Giants, meanwhile, who will be the first team statistically eliminated from winning their division, have actually increased fan attendance. They rank third this season in overall attendance instead of fourth last year, and are still pulling in 41,113 average guests a game in spite of their dismal performance. Attendance in Cleveland, no surprise, has jumped from 19,650 average in 2016 to 24,454 following their remarkable World Series run last season.
The other concern is about the aging population of baseball fans rather than current viewership, however. Over the last 10 years, the average age of a baseball viewer has risen from 52 to 57, suggesting that while old fans continue to watch, young ones aren’t filtering in fast enough to strike a balance. The new wave of changes we’ve seen to the game seem to suggest Manfred in concerned about the length of games being the major turn off for young fans, but nothing that’s been done so far to change that — removing pitches for intentional walks, a pitch clock, etc — have done anything to impact the length of games played. If anything, we’re looking at this the wrong way.
Average viewership age has gone up in all of the popular sports over the last decade. The NHL had the steepest increase, from 42 to 49 average, but both the NBA and NFL saw increases as well. This is not a baseball-specific problem. If anything, the MLB is making strides to make itself one of the most welcoming sports out there for a youthful audience.
It has become popular these days to blame Millennials for the death of everything from fabric softener to the housing industry, but they probably aren’t nefariously plotting the untimely demise of baseball.
Which brings me to the most logical explanation for a lack of engagement among young viewers. While apps and fun giveaways might help baseball reach a younger audience, they don’t address the problem at a systemic level. There’s one very specific reason Millennials don’t buy the things they’re blamed for killing, and that’s finances. A study by advocacy group Young Invincibles published earlier this year reveals that Millennials “are significantly less financially secure than [their] Baby Boomer parents,” both earning and saving less than Boomers at the same age. That’s consistent with other research on the subject.
The expense associated with attending a game, meanwhile, continues to increase. A Chicago Cubs ticket costs, on average, $150.63 this year, while even a Chicago White Sox ticket is averaging $30.26. The average young working adult can’t afford to shell out $150 for an evening’s entertainment. MLB owners, meanwhile, don’t appear to be in financial peril: they’re on the verge of receiving another $50 million each from the sale of another portion of BAMTech. (The Dodgers, impressively, are averaging $44.99 a ticket, and their monstrous attendance numbers quite possibly reflect the advantage of charging a more reasonable amount — and could prove to be a marker for their continued success in future seasons.)
Herein, we find the real solution to ensuring that Millennials don’t “kill” Major League Baseball. It’s not an app, a giveaway, or a game that’s three minutes shorter. Just make sure they can afford to go.
Ashley MacLennan is a writer and editor for the Detroit Tigers blog Bless You Boys, and deputy manager for the Tampa Bay Rays blog DRaysBay. Her writing has been featured at FanGraphs, and the Hardball Times, as well as on her own website 90 Feet From Home. Find her on Twitter @90feetfromhome
Pace of play is killing baseball. Batters, step in the box and be ready to hit. Pitchers, get the ball back and be ready to throw. It really is that simple. Ever since Chris Sale joined the Red Sox, I find most other pitchers completely unwatchable. Sale is the ideal pace that baseball should be (and for many, many years was) played at.
Hey everyone! We know what Manfred’s account is now!
That’s silly. Manfred doesn’t know what Fangraphs is.
I think that’s Bud’s account. He and John Henry are tight….
Dodger tickets remain relatively affordable because they have so many seats. Also, Sunday games in the summer are gnarly. Got a 90 degree game in the sun this Sunday. $9 and Darvish though!
I think that’s part of it, but also when you charge less for tickets, you get more people in the park to buy concessions. The food and alcohol is where the real margin lies I’d imagine.
Yeah, they are really expensive there. Fortunately you are allowed to bring in food and sealed water bottles. They get me with those $13 beers though.
I think being LA really helps. A lot of teams worry cheap seats mean expensive ones wont sell. But that isn’t true in LA, where there’s tons of rich people and Dodger Stadium is a place to be seen when the Lakers aren’t playing.
Dodgers attendance doesnt play the same game as other teams. A lot of teams have a promotion per series or something. Bobblehead for the first 10,000 fans! The Dodgers have a promotion for every single home game and it’s for the first 40k, or sometimes first 14k kids.
They’re the undisputed kings of in person attendance despite crappy driving and parking and a stadium that isn’t renowned for all the things modern stadiums focus on like restraunts and microbreweries. No one rates Dodger stadium food as near the best in MLB. But they’ve made attending an institution and most cities have lost that.
One of my fave stadiums. Great place to experience a game.
I have friends who will literally say to me, “all I want is a Dodger Dog for dinner.” I think they are crazy, but I think it’s because they associate it with the stadium, which is an awesome place to see a game.
Dodger Stadium may not have tons of exotic choices, but the Dodger dog is way better than I’ve experienced going to games at PNC park.
Millennials killing baseball? They’re the safety net! All it takes is 20 somethings to decide that baseball has become unpopular enough that it’s now cool counter-culture vintage, instead of stuffy old mainstream vintage, and they’ll be out in droves.
If that’s all it takes for someone to not love baseball f@$! that fan!
When did i say I didn’t love baseball?
Used to take my family to Cubs games, don’t anymore. It’s ridiculous.
Cubs were a staggering one for me. My first live MLB game was a Cubs/Brewers game I walked up for, paid about $20, and sat near the right field dugout. This past summer I paid $80 a ticket for the nosebleed section.
Interestingly, I think the pace of play currently has a lot more to do with hitter than pitchers. Most pitchers (especially the younger ones) are all on board with the “get ball, throw ball” mindset. It’s hitters like Rougned Odor who take forever to GET to the plate, then take forever to SETUP at the plate, then step out of the box and adjust their hands or sleeves or gloves or helmet or whatever after EVERY pitch. These are little more than rituals or ticks at this point. They need to be weeded out, and it’s obnoxious to have to sit there and watch a guy redo his gloves for the 5th time in 4 pitches.
Affordability is whatever. Buy a nosebleed and walk around the stadium or find standing room. The newer stadiums especially offer great fan experiences. If you take the history out of Wrigley, it really is a terrible fan experience.
Great article! This is very true, most people can’t afford spending so much for a night out. I know the Indians are selling SRO seats + a beer for $13. They also made good standing areas near the bars, and those seem to be doing well this year. I think mlb and all sports are going to have to find ways like this to bring the cost down a little and draw in younger fans.
I do have one issue with the ‘tickets are too expensive’ argument in the era of Stub Hub. I can get awesome front row seats to a Rockies game on the secondary market for $20 if I plan ahead a bit. For Tuesday’s Cubs game, I can get a pretty nice seat for $25 and if I just want to get into the stadium I can get a cruddy one for $9.
Sure, this is the secondary market, which has a different relation to team revenue. But if the issue is framed as this article was, that millennials don’t have *access* to baseball games in the first place because of expenses, that’s simply not the case.
I agree and disagree, which is funny. It really depends on the team. Last summer I paid about $16 for White Sox tickets on StubHub, but Cubs tickets were still about $80 each. I think there are cheap seats out there, but it’s not easy in all markets.
Sure, it varies, I guess I’m just saying that in a world where I can go out on relatively short notice and buy a selection of <$30 tickets to see the world champs, in one of the country's biggest markets, in a pennant race with about one month to go, it doesn't scream 'games are prohibitively expensive' to me.
FYI I don't buy the millennials are killing baseball thing either, though I think it could be the start of a larger conversation about how baseball has marketed itself & adapted poorly to a changing entertainment market.
But those sorts of stories don’t alter the fact that people do have less spending power and job security than their parents did, and baseball tickets are much much more expensive than they used to be. If we just keep having this “well, I can find cheap tickets if I really try” non-debate, we’ll never get anywhere.
I didn’t just pull these numbers out or the air, I went and looked it up on Stub Hub. I’m not entirely sure how the actual presence of cheap tickets is a ‘non debate’ when the complaint is that tickets are too expensive, unless you wanted to argue that either the seats you get with cheap tickets aren’t suitable for enjoying the game, or that millennials’ buying power is so weak that even $25 is prohibitive…
Stubhub has definitely been a huge help to those with more time than money. For the vast majority of teams, you can find games where even good seats are dirt cheap. Past generations didn’t have that luxury. 10 years ago, you either paid full price or you paid what you could haggle a scalper down to. In DC at least, the scalpers could be so hardheaded. They’d have lots of tickets, no demand, and would still ask for face value or above. I’d tell them that if they don’t give me a better deal, I’ll just buy from the box office, and they’d stick to their guns. It made absolutely no sense.
Agreed. Last tickets I bought on SH were close to $11 for $70 face value at Angels Stadium. I’m sure prices will vary but I paid for 6 people to go to a game for the face value cost of a single ticket.
There’s nothing like going to a game with a kid to create a lifetime bond for the sport. But it’s so costly now that it resembles classical music (which has its own age-related audience problems). Baseball needs to do a better job of marketing, but it also needs rational price entry-points–not for the prime seats, but locations that are watchable, whether it’s a parent taking a seven-year old, or a group of mid-twenties going to the cheap but decent seats after work. You want people to have a good time, and they can’t be blowing half a week’s pay to sit in the nosebleed section.
The related trend of new stadiums moving their upper decks further and further from the field (also mentioned in a Fangraphs piece earlier this year) exacerbates this trend. No kid is going to fall in love with pro baseball watching from the upper deck in left field in a modern stadium.
The Dodgers have lead mlb in attendance for like 35 or 40 years.
They were the first 15 teams to draw 3 million in attendance.
This isn’t a recent phenomenon. Dodger Stadium has consistently filled for generations. Only 3 times in the last 40 years have the Dodgers drawn less than 2.5 million, and 2 of the 3 were strike years (1981 and 1994)
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/teams/laatte.shtml
They almost certainly drew less than 2.5M through the gates in 2011 when fans were in open revolt against McCourt, but of course turnstile numbers are never publicly reported.
The one non-strike year in the past 40 that they failed to draw 2.5M was 1992, which was the franchise’s worst season in LA with 99 losses. And they still pulled 2.47M
They’ve always had very strong attendance and taken pride in it. My father still has a “10th man” hat they gave away back in the late 70’s when they were the first team to draw 3M.
It does help that their stadium holds well over 50,000 people.
If you count a sellout crowd in the region of 52k as “well over 50,000”
The stadium can fit 55k, but local ordinances only let them sell that on rare occasions
Great article, Ashley. One thing I was hoping to see in this article is something about the level of engagement in youth sports. It stands to reason that kids who play baseball grow up to be adults who watch baseball. How has youth baseball participation changed over time? Did Baby Boomers or millennials play more baseball as kids? I’d guess the former, but I don’t know.
Man that would be a great thing to look into, good idea.
I find it interesting how the Little League introduces players by having them say their name as well as their favorite ML player. It seems like these kids feel connected to some of these players, and a lot mention Trout, Harper, and Judge. MLB has done a hell of a job IMO of promoting Judge, which shows.
I also would bet on the former, by a lot.
But it’s also an issue of how many other sports kids play. Basketball and football both grew a lot in the 60s and 70s, and then Soccer came along as well. So even if a kid today plays some baseball as a youth, they have a greater chance of gravitating to other sports.
Something MLB should look at is the consequences of pushing youth baseball from a seasonal sport to a full-time, expensive and demanding one for kids. It’s clear that the high stakes youth baseball industrial complex raises huge financial and commitment barriers for most families that dissuade them from participating, and its unclear if it even results in a higher quality of talent inputs for the major league sport (way more kids blow out their elbows in their teens today).
It stands to reason that kids who play grow up to be adults who watch but do we have any data that support this? It wouldn’t be the first time something that seemed logical turned out to be erroneous. Maybe you’re asking this as a question?
an empty seat is lost revenue, seats are perishable.
Why do teams NOT do the walkup $5 tickets? 1 per person, you have to physically be at the park and you can only buy at the gate, 1hr prior to game or sooner.
Fill the seat as cheaply as possible, that person is going to buy at least 1 item at concession.
Let kids in for a dollar.
Agreed, something like this, or a season standing-room pass that gives access to 5 or 10 games at a steeply reduced rate, even.
You see, or used to see something like this with the Padres, but it was hsady re-sellers. This is what usually happens when you run shitty teams.
The Nationals still do this and it’s a great option if you’re able to get down to the stadium in person before they sell out.
I love these tickets at Nats Park, though I never actually go to the seats, I just stay in the standing room sections, where there are actually very good views.
“an empty seat is lost revenue, seats are perishable”
Careful, we’re charting into the over-booking mindset here.
Good idea, but the scalpers picking them up and reselling them would be a problem. Maybe the logistics are a problem, but since scanning tickets are electronic anyway, perhaps the teams could find a way that the ticket is only valid if you enter ~10 minutes after the ticket is purchased. (long lines entering the ballpark would be a problem though)
If it’s an hour before the game, and you limit it to two per person, then the impact of touts on it will surely be limited? If you – the fan – know that you can just walk 50 yards further and pay half the price, who’s going to go to a tout?
I really like this idea. You’re on to something.
Wouldn’t people just buy less from the team in advance, if they knew this was an option?
Do the TV viewership numbers reflect MLB at bat as well? If not, then maybe some of the decline could be attributed to that, and not indicate an actual drop in viewership.
These numbers were specifically for the primary cable broadcasters, which certainly would impact things.
Ok thanks. I was curious since I am one of those weirdos who doesn’t have cable but watches lots of games with the app.
Amen!
But it’s deeper than that. I’m going to repost some things I wrote on another thread (sorry; it’s on a similar topic: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/tampa-bay-and-the-millennial-challenge/), because I think it’s relevant here too.
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If I were to design something to appeal to millennials I’d make sure there were some decent outfield bleacher seats for $20. Maybe the $15 “cover charge” to hang out at Yankee stadium does this, but my guess is that for that price most non-fans would want to go a club and most fans would rather go to a sportsbar instead. Bleacher seats used to be where college kids could go and have a good time. At the Trop they’re $30, which is sort of in the right range. Dropping that even to $25 and trying to fill it with young people would be a huge benefit since hopefully they’d upgrade to pricier options as they get older. But there are $30 seats at the Trop that were literally $10 in 2009, so it just doesn’t seem likely to backtrack.
Unfortunately, there’s another issue which is that people “grow up” as sports fans. It’s a lot easier to convince a kid who grew up going to games to be a fan than one who didn’t. But if the ticket prices are high for families–and it’s about $50-60 for a good seat at the Trop–that’s over $200 for a family of four. How many kids grew up going to games? And if they’re not going to game as kids, what’s going to make them go as adults? To get a generation on board with something like this, you’ve got to get to them about 10 years before they’re making purchasing decisions.
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In other words, you have to get people while they’re young and they pay less money (or no money, because mom and dad paid for you), and then remember the good times at the park from when you were a kid. A lot of MLB teams could be headed for a demographic cliff and they don’t know it yet, because the people they want to buy tickets now they should have gotten on board 10 years ago.
The Rockies sell several thousand Rockpile (far centerfield bleachers) seats for $4/ticket, $1/ticket for ages 12 and under and 55 and over.
They also sell $16/ticket Rooftop (“party deck” in upper deck right field with many entertainment features and standing views of the game) which includes an $8 food credit – this area is teeming with millennials.
As a millennial who has sat in this section a couple times this year, I can attest to the large crowd of peers that sit up in those seats. Now about half pay a pittance of attention to the games, but they have a good time and drink a couple beers and cheer for the Rockies occasionally. Personally I like to sit a lot closer but it’s worked out when I’ve gone last minute.
It’s a great idea to pull in millennials who are more likely to bar hop or hit up a local brewery then spend a night at the game, but when tickets are reasonable it gives them a place to hang out and have a good time and wait and wait and wait for CarGo to break out of his slump.
Oh dear. If they’re waiting for CarGo to break out, they’re going to wake up very ill.
Lowering ticket prices would certainly help boost millenial attendance, but wouldn’t explain the relative performance of MLB to other sports. In most cases, the local baseball team is far cheaper to watch than the local NBA or NFL team.
As far as ratings declines, one wonders how much cord cutting plays a role, since teams have tied themselves to exclusive contracts with cable providers. I would gladly fork over a few hundred bucks to watch my favorite team all year, but MLB won’t let me unless I let Comcast charge me $1000 and take a large cut.
MLB.tv and a VPN goes a long ways.
When the only reasonable solution requires you to do something unethical/illegal/wrong/whatever, there is no good solution to the problem.
For me it’s the blackout rules. I once was an every-year subscriber to the MLB package and watch a ton of baseball. Now living in Iowa, 6 teams are blacked out. 40% of all baseball games on any given day are blacked out. That’s dumb. And now my boys couldn’t care less about the sport because we never watch, because I don’t waste my money on it.
VPN. you can even use Opera’s built-in one and re-login. but, i understand your point. it’s ridiculous when you can stream ads based on ip addresses.
Good exploration of the topic but kind of ignores how teams tie themselves to cable companies while millennials don’t want cable. That’s going to bleed into overall interest and it’s going to get worse as more people abandon high cable costs for Netflix. The whole reason cable companies buy team rights is to keep people buying cable for live sports, but it’s going to be awful for MLB in the long run.
There’s nothing like reports about Twitter activity to make a man feel old.
“Another positive sign for viewership is the recent ratings from the 2017 MLB Home Run Derby, which drew in 8.2 million viewers, surpassing viewership of the NFL Pro Bowl and the NBA All-Star Game. There’s clearly an audience ready to watch, provided there’s something they want to see.”
What did the ASG itself draw?
“The Giants, meanwhile, who will be the first team statistically eliminated from winning their division, have actually increased fan attendance. They rank third this season in overall attendance instead of fourth last year, and are still pulling in 41,113 average guests a game in spite of their dismal performance.”
That speaks volumes about their loyal fanbase and the majestic beauty that is AT&T Park. That is truly one of the best parks to watch a game at. Especially during the day.
“Just make sure they can afford to go.”
The same can be said for a family of four.
I think MLB’s restrictions with MLB.tv deserve a mention in this article. Most every company in the world strives to make it as easy as possible for you to purchase/consume their product. Not MLB! All the owners care about is money (obviously), but they’re being really myopic is this area by not actively trying to engage every potential fan. Making it difficult to watch local teams is so short sighted.
I had the same thought. It’s hard to believe that the blackout restrictions are still beneficial financially or for helping the growth of the sport.
Plus, the blackout restrictions are nonsense. I live in an area in the mountain west where the closest team is about a 10 hour drive, if you feel like making a speed challenge out of it, People tend to gravitate towards rooting for Seattle here.
What does MLB do? Black out the whole state from Seattle games on cable & MLB.tv… How many kids are going to grow up either (1) rooting for a team they never seen on t.v. or (2) rooting for a team they CAN see on t.v. but no one else they know cares about?
Maybe if the millennials got jobs they could afford it?
And fabric softener died?
You’re right on Ashley. And I say that not as a Millennial, but as a Boomer. MLB clubs make so much money from TV rights and tech sales that the actual revenue generated at the old ball park is, relatively speaking, pretty much peanuts. I recently took a group of seven to a game at Coors. I was visiting and rarely have a chance to attend baseball games so I wanted “good seats”. We sat behind the visitors’ dugout, which was great, but at $70+ per ticket I had to drop $500 just to take the family to a game. I could not help but feel that this was a bit greedy on the part of the Rockies. Sounds like the Dodger ownership group cares about their fans and is willing to show their appreciation with more reasonable ticket prices. Hopefully, the other MLB owners will eventually get on board. Well-written pieces like yours can only help. Keep up the good work.
My wife and I paid $25 a ticket to sit six rows from third base at Miller Park at an afternoon game in May. All the kids were at school and most folks were at work. It was nice. Food was decent price, ballpark experience was superior to anywhere I’ve been. Great.
But then we paid $24 for nosebleeds in Cincinnati earlier this month. Expensive concessions (although they have a all-you-can-eat for $20 stand, which is neat), expensive & challenging to find parking.
Or the $30 seats in Kansas City my dad and I bought? I mean, it’s not that I can’t afford these tickets (but I do have to plan well in advance and save for them), but it’d be nice for baseball to lessen the blow.
Baseball isn’t hurting for cash, and it’s not like all of these parks are using supply-demand to jack the prices up. None of those 3 parks were remotely close to full. You want young people at the park? Lower the frickin’ price of the tickets. They’ll show up.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Really good examination of what is (and isn’t) going on here.
I think pace of play is a small problem and time of play is going to continue to be a bigger one. It’s not that young people find the game boring (though many do); it’s that few younger people are willing to give up 3 to 3 1/2 hours to watch a game on TV. Besides all the other things that they could do instead in the same amount of time (1-2 streaming movies, 7 episodes of a show on Netflix, 3-4 DOTA matches, 15 Rocket League games, etc.), many young people have to work several jobs just to make ends meet. This is why golf is also hurting in terms of people playing and why 9-hole and executive courses are seeing an uptick.
So I think every little bit of time we can shave off that doesn’t materially change/harm the game is totally worth it. If you get from 3 hour, 5 minute average game length (which is this year’s average through June for 9-inning games) down to 2 hour 46 (which was the average in 2005), that will almost certainly result in some higher number of people watching a full game. How many more people is the question.
I think the game needs to implement every small thing (one year at a time) that helps both pace and overall time: enforce the pitch clock, encourage umpires to call a strike if a batter is messing with their gloves with one foot in the box, discourage convoluted signs from the coach to the batter on EVERY pitch, limit mound visits from coach and catcher, automatic replays from a booth when a call is egregiously and obviously wrong, put a minimum limit on batters a relief pitcher must face, enforce the length of between-inning breaks. Most of these (except the relief pitcher one) will likely have almost no impact on the game other than to save time. If it shaves off 5-10 minutes, that’s an improvement.
Then MLB needs to make it easy and relatively inexpensive for everyone to stream any/every game they want. No blackouts, no restrictions, etc. No one goes to a game just because they can’t see it on TV. That’s a dumb rule.
Finally, MLB needs to be donating tens of millions (hundreds?) in equipment to Little Leagues and middle schools to make it cheaper for kids to play. With the continuing decline of football participation, this is a golden opportunity to get lots of poor and middle class kids to choose baseball instead of football (otherwise they will choose basketball).
Counterpoint on the minimum batters a reliever must face:
“Gee, coach, I’ve faced all righties, now a lefty is up. My knee hurts.”
Coach claims “injury” and removes him. New reliever comes in and gets unlimited warm up pitches. We just took up a considerable amount of time.
Besides, telling teams how they can utilize their players is a bit much.
you could counter this with some sort of DL requirement
Maybe if they had a “batters eye” or a “pitchers eye” like in a video game, that could entice the millennials.
All of the articles about average ages, are they factoring in demographic changes as a whole (lots of baby boomers) or cable/network tv demographic changes (millenials being cord cutters)?
The only thing you can see better at the game than on TV is balls in play. Yet Less than 50% of PA have a ball in play and 85% of pitches thrown result in no balls in play. A 3 Hour game might have 15 minutes of action other than pitcher and catcher playing catch, mound conferences, pick off attempts, video reviews, pitching changes/warmups. How many ways can one say boring?
They want 50-100 bucks a pop for tickets plus parking and 10 dollar beers and hotdogs. I wouldnt attend a game if you gave me free tickets. I do watch on TV but usually multi-task because , need I say it- because its so boring
Maybe some more brawls like the Yankees-Tigers game could get me to the park. But today most of the players and opponents are friends off the field
So why do you read Fangraphs?
Going to a Twins game in the 1960s was affordable.
The Griffith family owned the club.
They were baseball people,with no outside interests.
Life was slower,and kids played ball.
Today kids have lots of interests,and life is much faster paced.
More choices,a different time.
The article misses several points that explain declining interest in baseball. 1) The steroid era significantly undermined the credibility of the sport in the eyes of many. This was a lost generation of new fans. 2) Teams don’t care. Used to be attendance and in stadium merchandising and concessions were the main drivers of revenue. Now it is the local TV contract, revenue sharing, public financing deals on new stadiums, and online merchandising. The presence of the fan has become superfluous. 3) With the advances in viewing technology, watching at home has become a better viewing experience. All sports suffer from this, but the nature of baseball makes it particularly keenly felt.
As a Millennial, I like baseball because I can miss some games and not feel like I’m losing much.
I realize I’m really late to the game here, but I’m not sure why playing baseball as a kid or spending money on it in your 20s necessarily has any predictive value for what behavior you exhibit in your 40s and 50s. A strong link seems to be taken as given but I’m skeptical.
Great article. One thing: Those ticket prices you quote are *preseason, secondary market* prices. I saw figures later in the year showing Baltimore’s prices came way down (for obvious reasons) and L.A./Atlanta also moved up/down in the rankings accordingly.
Also, Dodger Stadium now has the most seats (56K). So awesome team, classic stadium, tons of seats, lots of cheap seats, Dodger Dogs, 24 oz. Modelo cans, every day is sunny…yeah, winning formula.
millenials and constant bickering about computer strike zone will ruin the game.