Major League Baseball developing a TV series about Babe Ruth
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 MLB 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, flaws-and-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 an overall push by MLB 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.
“The goal is to get on as many different screens as possible,” Nick Trotta, senior director of media programming and licensing for Major League Baseball, said. “That means different things today more than ever. There are more types of physical screens but also different types of services and programming genres.”
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 and the second straight year the event had seen an increase, according to Nielsen. Local MLB games were the top-rated programs on the nights they aired in 12 markets, up from nine in 2016.
But the age of baseball’s TV audience has ticked upward in the last 10 years. Among major team sports, the median age for baseball’s audience was 57 in 2016, up four years from 2006, according to Nielsen. The median age for the NFL is 50, also gaining four years over the same period.
Streaming video is pulling younger viewers away from all of TV, and Major League Baseball has been a significant beneficiary of the trend. MLB’s technology company BAMTech serves a number of video content providers and has been a financial windfall for team owners. In August, the league sold a 42 percent stake in the unit to Walt Disney Co. for $1.58 billion, which will use it to launch its own sports TV streaming service using the ESPN name. Disney had purchased a 33 percent stake last year for $1 billion.
Streaming is also helping to lift baseball viewing overall. ESPN’s combined audience for TV and streaming of its MLB regular season games rose 6 percent over 2016.
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 MLB At Bat, the league’s app that offers highlights and live streaming video of every game, is 33.
Sports marketing experts say drawing a new generation of fans takes more than an online presence, which is why MLB’s push to expand its presence in other entertainment venues makes sense.
“Nobody is born a baseball fan or a football fan,” said sports media consultant Lee Berke. “They are all blank slates. In the midst of a very competitive marketplace for share of mind, baseball has to be very aggressive in getting new fans signed up.”