Series on baseball bad boy, Ruth, League’s play for fans
Major League Baseball wants to turn its first superstar, New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth, into TV’s next big anti-hero.
The league is involved in developing a limited TV series about the life of the hard-partying home run king. Director-producer Allen Coulter, whose credits include the HBO hits The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, has been hired by the League to oversee the project. It’s envisioned as an unrestricted, candid look at Ruth’s raucous times off the field, often driven by his prodigious appetite for booze and women.
Presenting a realistic, flawsand-all portrait of baseball’s historic icon may seem like a risk for a sport that has sought to maintain its upright image as America’s pastime. But the project is part of a push by the League to get exposure in entertainment genres and platforms that reach younger viewers, who are not watching as much baseball on TV as their parents or grandparents did.
Baseball continues to be a strong attraction for traditional TV viewing. The average audience of 22.8 million viewers for the 2016 World Series was a 12-year ratings high, according to Nielsen.
But the age of baseball’s TV audience has ticked upward in the last 10 years. The median age for baseball’s audience was 57 in 2016, up four years from 2006, according to Nielsen. The median age for the National Football League is 50, also gaining four years over the same period, while the figure is 42 for the National Basketball Association, an increase of two years.
Streaming video is pulling younger viewers away from all of TV, and Major League Baseball has been a significant beneficiary of the trend. The League’s technology company, BAMTech, serves a number of video content providers and has been a financial windfall for team owners.
Streaming is also helping to lift baseball viewing overall. ESPN’s combined audience for TV and streaming of its regular season games rose 6 percent over 2016. The number of minutes streamed of the National League Division Series was up 102 percent over last year. This last season, the league started offering live games on Facebook, Twitter and Intel True VR, a virtual reality app. Clearly younger fans have gravitated to digital platforms as the median age of the users for the League At Bat, the league’s app that offers highlights and live streaming video of every game, is 33.
Baseball is also battling challenges as its languid pace is at odds with a generation used to getting nonstop action from highlights and clips on YouTube and other streaming platforms. The average length of a nine-inning game hit 3 hours and 8 minutes this past regular season.
The League has implemented rule changes to quicken the pace of the game and is examining ways to do more on that front while it reaches out to new fans.
Nick Trotta, senior director of media programming and licensing for the League, said it is more open than ever to providing its trademarked logos, ballparks and archival footage to nonsports content that caters to contemporary tastes.
The thinking is that featuring a landmark such as the Boston Red Sox historic home field Fenway Park in a movie such as Stronger, which tells the story of one of the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist bombing victims, can give baseball an emotional bond with viewers.
The league was also involved in the production of Let’s Play Two, a documentary film about rock group Pearl Jam’s 2016 concerts at Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, who last year won their first World Series since 1908. The film will be on Amazon Prime starting Thursday.
While turning to Babe Ruth, who played in the 1920s, is a throwback to the game’s storied past, Trotta believes the creative freedom that TV offers can present him as the kind of difficult, complicated character that younger audiences are drawn to on premium cable channels and streaming services.
“There are things in Ruth’s life that really resonate today,” Trotta said. “The best stories need to be told over and over as tastes change.”