Baseball is the oldest Major League Sport in the United States out of the 4 major league sports. The MLB was founded in 1903. 116 years ago, unfortunately they are going through a period where it will either make or break the sport entirely. Baseball is currently facing a lot of issues between attendance and tv ratings that they need to fix.
In today's day baseball has gone from a national sport to more of a regional sport. Today's fans really only care about the teams from their area. If you're from San Francisco, typically you'll only keep up with the Giants and not any other teams. Fans today are more only worrying about their team and not caring so much about other teams they aren't fans of. The MLB is facing many issues at hand and if they don't act quickly they could destroy the game of baseball forever.
Attendance for the games are dipping dramatically, with the Giants taking the biggest hit. According to SF Chronicle, the Giants are losing an average of 6,613 fans per game. The Giants went from having an average of 39,278 fans per game to 32,665 per game, that's a 17% drop off in fans in just one season. The second biggest drop off would be the Blue Jays who lost 4,578.
The worst case scenario for the attendance drop off would be the Miami Marlins. They are struggling to sell any seats at all this season. Opening day the Marlins had 25,423 fans, the next game they had 6,503 just one day later. If you take away the opening day game the average fans at the game is 8,722 fans. Just to help give you an idea on how bad that is, the Marlins Park can hold 36,742 people if it's sold out. They are only selling about 24% of the seats they can sell.
According to Market Watch, the average age of a baseball fan is 57 years old, where in 2006 the average age was 52. Only 7% of baseball's audience is under the age of 18, which means they are having a harder time appealing to the youth. Without a proper youth movement baseball is facing a bigger issue in the coming years. When the under 18 gets older, there will not be as large of an audience watching the game. This will lead the attendance problem today being a bigger issue and causing baseball to lose money.
Before we go over the deep end and completely say baseball is dead we need to look at the ratings. According to Forbes, the MLB regional ratings have increased in 2018 by 2%. This just proves that baseball isn't fully dying, but more dying on a national level. Baseball is turning into a regional sport and the commissioner of the MLB, Rob Manfred, needs to embrace it. Manfred needs to create superstars with each team so the fans can go out and see them play. You already have stars like Aaron Judge and Bryce Harper but every team needs to have one star. If every team in the league can market one player to their fanbase they can attract more fans to the games.
Superstars can change the attendance for baseball, a great example of this is Philadelphia. Last season they were 17th in attendance averaging 27,318 fans per game, this season they are 4th in the league averaging 36,823 fans a game. Not everyone can get a Harper to help them raise the attendance but if a team can market the team's identify to fit the region it could work in their favor. If the Miami Marlins identify the identify of Miami and build the team to reflect Miami it could raise the attendance rate.
Another huge reason for baseball dying is that the analytics kill them. In baseball there are so many analytics at this point where it's basically killed a lot of the arguments between fans. NBA fans can argue till they are blue in the face if Kevin Durant or LeBron James is a better basketball. In baseball there are so many analytics at this point where it has basically killed these conversations.
The biggest problem with baseball is that Mike Trout, MLB's best player, could walk into a bar and the average person doesn't know what he looks like. Baseball is doing an awful job at marketing their best player and other stars around the league. Arguably the only player who could walk into a bar and everyone knows who they are is Bryce Harper. Mike Trout should be the cover of baseball games and needs to be more heavily endorsed. Trout should be on Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and more late night shows to try to get more people excited for the season. Trout has the largest deal in baseball and only has 1.5 million followers on Instagram, to compare this to other stars Tom Brady has 6.1 million and LeBron James has 48.9 million followers.
The MLB needs to market their players better if they want to keep baseball alive. Baseball could be facing a huge problem in the upcoming years with the youth being more interested in football and basketball. ESPN has been having a problem marking baseball to as they have cancelled Baseball Tonight. Rob Manfred is currently being faced with the fact that baseball is slowly dying and he has to figure out how to fix this problem. If Manfred can't figure out this issue baseball could slide out of the top 3 sports in America.
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