An Old Pastime Perseveres
BY BENJAMIN SZANTON
As with global temperatures or the cost of college, a graph of TV viewership of the World Series presents a consistently ominous trend over the past 20 years. This year’s Series, in which the San Francisco Giants defeated the Kansas City Royals to win their third championship in five years, was no exception.
The narrative, however, is not so simple. Although baseball may be no longer be our national “pastime,” it remains culturally important and generates plenty of money. It is most certainly not dying.
Baseball cannot compete with football for a national TV audience. Football’s interplay of grace and violence, complicated plays within a simple game, and its constant, built-in play stoppages, make it an ideal sport for TV. Millions of people enjoy watching football for the sake of watching football, regardless of whether or not their favorite team is playing. Not only has the Super Bowl set TV ratings records for the past several years, but regular season NFL games have consistently generated substantial TV revenue. On the other hand, regular season baseball games have fallen short and even the World Series has been losing viewers. This year’s Series went its maximum length, to a winner-take-all Game 7, but was the third least-watched World Series since 1984.
But Major League Baseball has found a solution. Instead of broadcasting all their games nationally, they have adopted a regional broadcasting model. While the league maintains national TV deals with ESPN, TBS, and Fox that combined generate more than $1.5 billion per year, as has its own MLB Network, its primary TV revenue comes from local cable deals made by its 30 franchises. The ten teams with the most lucrative of these deals, which include equity stakes, make a total of $1.7 billion per year from the deals. An average baseball game may be seen by comparatively few people, but in a 162-game season, viewership adds up. Baseball has found a system that ensures that even with viewership of their showcase event dropping, their regional popularity is relatively healthy and their TV revenue is growing.
The World Series was a perfect example of baseball’s appeal. Game 7 was a considerable success for Fox — its best-rated Wednesday night event since 2011. But the real support came regionally, in San Francisco, where 64 percent of people watching TV had the game on, and Kansas City, where 77 percent did. Although the average American is less likely to tune in to the World Series, this is not a death sentence for baseball. If Kansas City, which had gone 29 years without making the playoffs, could support their team so strongly, baseball must still carry real cultural cachet.
Even if baseball remains healthy in the present, it must continue to attract fans in the future. Youth participation in baseball is dropping, and according to a Nielsen study, half of all baseball’s TV viewers in 2013 were at least 55 years old.
The larger story, however, is that youth participation in team sports is dropping, across all sports. During the same period, 2008-2012, when baseball participation dropped 7.2 percent, basketball participation fell even more sharply. Football participation fell as well, and even soccer, hailed as America’s future pastime, lost nearly the same percentage of its 6- to 18-year-old participants. However, youth participation in a sport is neither a prerequisite for fandom nor an especially good indicator of it. If it were, baseball would be far more popular than football—despite the decline in percentage, nearly twice as many kids play baseball as football. NASCAR, which more Americans consider their favorite sport aside from football and baseball, would have almost no fans at all.
One downside of baseball’s regional appeal model is the lack of a star player to represent the league on a national level. It is possible that the recently-retired Derek Jeter will be one of the last players to ever be a nationally-recognized baseball celebrity. It would be nice for the league if someone took his place. However, this is complicated by more than just the television arrangement. Last year’s All-Star game included players born in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Japan. English is the second language of many of the game’s best players.
As it is, however, the league is doing just fine. Major League Baseball sold 73.7 million tickets during the 2014 regular season. Its average per-game attendance over 162 games per team was nearly half of the what the NFL, our unquestioned new national pastime, managed over just 16 games. Baseball may once have had a greater share of the American sports landscape, but it remains popular, successful and important. It is not a dying sport.