Baseball facing demographic dilemma
TRADITIONAL SPORT NEEDS TO FIND WAYS OF APPEALING TO FAN BASE THAT IS NOT TRENDING YOUNGER (57) IS THE AVERAGE AGE OF A FAN OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL.
The All-Star Game at Nationals Park was nice and all, a chance for Washington to show off its love of the game and baseball to show off the talents and personalities of its best players, but in its aftermath, it is useful and important to look at what we came out of the game talking about.
We came out of the 89th All-Star Game talking about Mike Trout — not gushing about how transcendent a player he is, but debating, through pointed comments and statements, whether baseball does enough to market him and its other stars, and whether he does enough to market himself.
We came out of it talking about selfies and mic’d-up outfielders, not as a refreshing reminder of the varied and engaging personalities of the players, but as a symbol of the game moving further away from its traditions.
And we came out of it talking about strikeouts and home runs — not so much in the context of the breathtaking barrage of 98-mph fastballs from seemingly every pitcher who appeared, or the record-setting 10 home runs that were hit in the game, but as an indictment of the all-or-nothing style of play that has taken over the sport.
We also came out of it, of course, talking about Josh Hader’s awful tweets as a 17-year-old, but that’s a topic for another time.
Only in baseball, a sport given to deeper and more critical self-examination than any other, does this happen and the inescapable conclusion coming out of Washington’s all-star extravaganza is that this sport, if not in crisis, is at least at a crossroads in regards to what it wants to be, as both a game played by gifted human beings and an entertainment product and cultural institution.
We have more information to digest in baseball than ever, from the launch angles and exit velocities that are an intractable part of the broadcasts now, to the advanced analytics that are behind the rise in defensive shifts, to the advanced metrics that help us understand the game better than ever but that also are wielded by some to advance the notion there are blackand-white, unequivocal answers to the questions of who the MVP of the league is and who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.
Numbers can tell us where the game has a problem: The leaguewide batting average (.247) that is the lowest in 46 years. There are more strikeouts than hits for the first time in history. The 5 1/2-per cent attendance drop may or may not be attributable to April weather.
But the most important number for baseball, in the context of the current health of the game and its mission for the future, is 57.
That is the average age of a fan of Major League Baseball, according to data compiled by Sports Business Journal in 2016. And it is going in the wrong direction: In 2006, the average age was 53. For comparison’s sake, the average of an NBA fan, based on the 2016 data, is 42. For the NFL, 50. And for the NHL, 49.
When you visualize baseball’s audience growing old and grey and, well, you know what follows that stage in a lifespan, you can begin to appreciate the magnitude of baseball’s challenge and the urgency of the mission.
And when you think of the controversial tweaks, changes and decisions that Commissioner Rob Manfred has made, and the ones he is still mulling, that context is crucial to understanding the motivations. Yes, the game is built on its traditions, and they are essential to its ethos, but to survive as a major sport, baseball needs to be faster-paced, more actionfilled and — yes — more accessible and entertaining to younger generations that might have different viewpoints on what is or isn’t fun.
The trick, of course, is satisfying both sides. And maybe that’s impossible.
In a Q-and-A session Monday at the National Press Club, Manfred was asked about how baseball balances its outreach to newer millennial fans:
“I do think the tension you refer to — in terms of entertainment in the ballpark that captivates younger people and is interesting to them, on the one hand, which some people might see as a distraction or an annoyance on the other — is part of a real fundamental tension that we wrestle with every day in terms of the business or baseball,” Manfred said. “And that is, we never want to alienate that core fan base we have and have always have had. On the other hand, we want to do everything we can to attract the people who are not part of that fan base.
“As with every business, you need new customers.”