T-Mobile Park (Photo by Susan Dennis, via Flickr)
As the sport (and world) burns all around them, Major League Baseball and the MLBA continue fruitless negotiations to get the sport back on track. The sides seem oblivious to the damage they are causing.
The politicking of both parties is exhausting. Sports overall is seeing an increase in viewership. Over the weekend, Charlotte FC set a new MLS single-game attendance record of 74,479. Major League Soccer is the sport that just won’t go away. Believe it or not, they are eating into the MLB market share. Their season runs at the same time the Major League Baseball season runs.
In 2021, with many pandemic mandates in place to limit attendance, the average attendance of an MLS game was 16,910. In 2019, it was 21,873. Let’s run that up against the MLB average. In 2021, with pandemic mandates in place, the average attendance was 18,900, and in 2019 it was 28,317. The drop-off is significant because the leagues run in a similar timeframe.
In several MLS/MLB cities, MLS won. Seattle, Atlanta (WS Champs), Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Miami were the teams where more fans watched live games on average than their MLB counterparts. MLB still owns the total attendance share as there are typically 81 home games. Though not in 2022.
The NBA expanded their playoffs from 8 teams in each conference to 10. Seeds 7-10 go through a play-in-game style format for the opportunity to square off against the top two seeds in each division. That’s 20 markets that make the postseason. As baseball is supposed to be winding up and the NBA winding down, the NBA is now pulling a larger share of the sports entertainment world than they’re supposed to.
Don’t get me wrong, the NBA is still a distant third in overall viewership, but their growth trajectory would tell you that they will pass MLB soon. To the layman, it would seem that it’s based on the entertainment value of baseball. It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison here as the NBA ranks as easily the highest part-time viewership sport with audiences likely to tune in live if the score is close in the fourth quarter and watch the finish.
Where in baseball, there isn’t a finite time limit and often times it’s hard to be a part-time viewer and know what is going on or what is going to happen. Without baseball, though, basketball takes center stage and gives reasons for the casual fan or part-time viewer to pay attention to the instant gratification of finishing an NBA game vs. the time investment required to watch baseball.
As Little League, Cal Ripken, travel teams, and all amateur baseball leagues come roaring to life; there’s an air of disappointment lingering around. There is nothing that will stop the ultra-gifted from continuing to play baseball. But a lack of Major League Baseball is something that will stop other athletes from choosing the sport.
When there are so many avenues to a college scholarship, team sports, baseball, the one constant as James Earl Jones’s character in Field of Dreams said, has become inconsistent. As with everything in life, inconsistency leads to apathy.
Apathetic feelings towards a sport are the real killer. Adults encouraging their kids to play baseball are having a hard time believing in the professional version of the sport. What happens when the glory days stop existing? Who’s going to tell the baseball stories that get kids to fall in love with the game all over? Who’s going to be the one to show what they did as a ballplayer if apathy permeates the sport?
As of this writing, the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv are under siege. Volnovakha and Mariupol are now under Russian control. Thousands of civilians have been injured or killed along with troops on both sides of this horrid situation. 1.5 million Ukrainians have sought refuge in Romania, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary.
Regardless of your news source or political view, you have to be tone-deaf and be a public figure complaining about money. Former Heavyweight Boxing Champion and mayor of Kyiv, Vitaly Klitschko sounds off in a desperate plea for help while NATO countries and EU member-states await the next move by Putin.
The world is watching, and there aren’t many distractions for the diehard baseball fans. Some of us feel guilty for being angry that MLB can’t get their act together and fix this. Guilty because of everything that is going on in our world. Guilt leads to disenfranchisement and, once again apathy, because MLB continues to occupy mainstream news cycles while the war continues in Ukraine.
Fans have a hard time taking sides in this labor dispute because MLB and the MLBPA continue to act spoiled, and they are entitled to our money. Plus, both sides are publicly waging negative campaigns against each other, further hurting the game.
The answer is no; they couldn’t be more tone-deaf. While the entertainment and sports world continues to thrive, MLB is busy creating apathy towards their sport. While the world outside of entertainment sports churns in turmoil, MLB is basically encouraging fans to become disenfranchised with the game.
In 1994, a strike killed the last month and a half of the regular season and the entire postseason. Baseball came back in 1995, almost a month late after a delayed start to the season. The divisions changed, and the sides agreed on a four playoff team system.
MLB was king then. Sure the NFL was making great strides to compete with Major League Baseball for sports entertainment market-share, but there was more than enough to go around. The NBA was a distant third but was expanding their league at the time.
In 2020 though, the pandemic kicked off the first signs of real labor trouble. Major League Baseball had an opportunity to take the field first, in regards to all team sports. That negotiation exposed MLB’s fragility and lack of awareness about where they stood as a sport.
Eventually, MLB settled on a 60-game sprint for 2020 after neither side could compromise on something greater. Those contentious negotiations foreshadowed the 2022 CBA showdown between the two organizations.
That leaves us with this. I’m on seven different MLB-related pages/groups in Social Media, which is probably way less than I should. In one of them, there are 21k members, small by comparison. On Tuesday, March 1st, as MLB expanded the lockout by wiping out a week’s worth of baseball games. I counted 319 individuals “I don’t care about baseball anymore” or something similar.
In the rule of Social Media, the vocal group typically represents about 10 percent of those that feel the same way. By using simple mathematics, that one event likely led to 3K “I don’t care about baseball anymore” thoughts.
How much more of this do they think they can get away with? In 2019, baseball revenues exceeded $10 billion (the record for most revenue ever), but what if Manfred canceling part of the season also negated $749 million?
$749 million is a lot of money, and haggling over a Competitive Balance Tax (CBT) that very few teams reach anyway is pennies compared to the loss of revenue. Let’s look at it a different way.
A full season of attendance typically averages $1.32 million in per game revenue with tickets, food, concessions, parking, etc. In total, the owners have canceled 90 games so far, which equates to $123 million for the week. The difference between the Pre-Arb number the Owners want and the Players want is about $50 million.
I know it’s simple math, and for those that want the deep dive, it’s not the point. The point is that what’s happening now creates apathy. And despite the flaws in my calculations, many more are silently leaving baseball as a result of this fight.
MLB and the MLBPA are gambling more than they know on fans returning to baseball. In 2019, 29K fans, on average, saw baseball games. Leading to a record total of 68.5M total fans hitting the turnstiles at Major League parks. Attendance likely takes a huge hit, at least to start the season, similar perhaps to where 2021 was.
The MLB will certainly have its work cut out for them once the sides agree on a new CBA. The further MLB falls behind the normal MLB spring training schedule, the harder it becomes to get fans back on board. Once paying customers, they will allocate their money to other forms of entertainment that value them. Unlike how the MLB is treating its fan base.
This lockout is a black eye and gut punch to a sport that has taken its share of hits over the last two seasons. Will the MLB remain standing after taking blow after self-inflicted blow? I suspect they will. But they will have lost a lot of people as a result. The ripple effect of losing fans to apathy is that they don’t return in the next generation. Those people are gone forever.
The difference between 1994 and 2022 is that Major League Baseball had very little competition in 1995 when they bounced back. In 2022, Major League Baseball is competing with everything everywhere, and an instant gratification culture is looking elsewhere to invest their entertainment dollar and time.
Joe Swenson is a lifelong baseball fan, writer, author, producer, and director for Broken Arts Entertainment.