By Tyler Ruff
Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet … in 1975, this advertisement campaign for Chevrolet was stuck in Americans’ heads for years and years. Now, basketball or football would probably be used in an advertisement campaign. Everyone has been saying for decades now that baseball has become a dying sport.
I will not try to build a case saying baseball is more popular than football or basketball, but calling it dying is an extreme exaggeration. While baseball is no longer the most popular sport in America, it is still a global juggernaut.
Players have gotten better, and while strikeouts have become more and more common, which I understand can be tedious at times, the ball has been leaving the field faster and going farther and farther at a rate we have not seen since the steroid era. People have also talked about a lack of superstars in the MLB since Derek Jeter retired, and I would disagree.
Shoei Ohtani is a must-watch TV and breaks records almost every time he steps on the diamond. Mike Trout, Ronald Acuna Jr., Mookie Betts, Fernado Tatis Jr., and Juan Soto are all in big markets and have built significant popularity.
Two significant myths people say about baseball being a dying sport must be debunked: the length of games and then the revenue for the MLB.
Many people complain about how long the games last. Last season, the MLB changed this by adding a pitch clock to force the pitchers to not just sit around for a minute and wait to throw a pitch that they already knew they were going to throw.
Christina Gough of Statista said about the length of games after the pitch clock was introduced: “This was more than 20 minutes shorter than an average game during the previous season when the pitch clock had not yet been introduced.”
An NFL game is, on average, 3 hours and 12 minutes, and an NBA game is about two and a half hours. An MLB game is now 2 hours and 45 minutes since the pitch clock has been introduced.
MLB games that start at seven will allow you to go to bed before 10. These new rules have given the fans more exciting games. Putting a runner on second base to start extra innings has made games that go into extra innings end quicker than ever. The bases’ size has increased, which has increased the rate of hits and stolen bases — excitement we have not seen in years.
These new rules have allowed for more exciting and action-packed games, which has made them so much more entertaining for the sport’s fans. If a sport were truly dying, then viewership, attendance, and revenue would go down.
When any product is losing popularity—or “dying” in viewership—attendance and revenue will decline. ESPN Press Room says, “ESPN’s MLB game telecasts are averaging 1,517,000 viewers, up from 1,419,000 viewers at this time in 2022.” In a single year, viewership increased by nearly 100,000 viewers. When it comes to attendance, in 2023, attendance was 70.7 million, while in 2022, it was 64.5 million.
You might think the year after COVID really isn’t the best year to use, but if you do the last full season before COVID, you can see that attendance in 2019 was 68.5 million, which is still an increase of millions more fans attending games.
Viewership and attendance have been up for a sport people feel the need to call a dying sport. Revenue for MLB is the most significant indicator of its actual success. According to Forbes, “Before any expenses, MLB saw revenues of between $10.8-$10.9 billion, a new record that the league has confirmed.
The increase surpasses the prior record of $10.7 billion set in 2019.” If a company founded in 1867 set a record for its highest revenue ever, no one would say it was dying. However, people still believe that baseball is dying. If anything, baseball is getting bigger and bigger, allowing it even more success in the coming decades.
While I understand that baseball is no longer the biggest sport in the eyes of Americans, that does not mean that they have not been killing it when it comes to success. No one would say Bill Gates is not successful anymore just because Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have overtaken him as the wealthiest men in the world. With new rules being created and more to come to allow for a more action-packed, shorter game experience for the fans, I would say to not sell but buy into the MLB stock immediately.