You may have heard it before: baseball is dying.
It’s not. Englishman Shohei Ohtani is perhaps the most interesting athlete in the world. Baseball games offer primetime programming in almost every major city. The intensity of this month’s World Baseball Classic and the introduction of new rules designed to be athletic and increase the pace should spark even more interest. And a dying industry isn’t generating record revenue like Major League Baseball did last year.
In recent weeks, you may have heard from an unlikely source that “baseball is dying”: the owners of several major league teams, which MLB has described as “an industry in crisis” where “the vast majority of players, and Clubs I don’t like baseball’s economic system.” One owner suggested his team hadn’t spent on free agents last winter because his budding team “outperformed” last summer.
Hey fans, buy your tickets now!
Seriously, hire Curtis Granderson to do all the talking and help generate the big ideas. Granderson told me five years ago how baseball failed to develop fans across the country, in part because the league didn’t give Mike Trout the chance to play where fans could see him. This year, Trout and Ohtani and all the Angels will play against each team.
The best players now appear in your city every two years, not every six years. And you’ll actually see them play – none of that “cargo management” nonsense where NBA teams charge hundreds of dollars and then Anthony Davis or Kawhi Leonard or (insert star here) a day off at his team’s only appearance in your city in this season.
If the Killjoy owners can get out of the way, baseball could thrive, according to the results of an Ipsos survey released Thursday. After years of talking about how baseball is dying and how the NBA has overtaken MLB in popularity, how young people prefer so many other sports and how soccer is the next big thing, the poll results tell a different story.
In January — during the NFL, NBA and NHL seasons but during a dead spell for MLB — Ipsos surveyed 1,035 American adults and asked if they were fans of 13 sports. You can be a fan of as little or as much sports as you want.
The NFL, of course, led the way, with 44% of respondents saying they were fans of the NFL. Second: baseball at 31%, followed by college football at 29%, NBA at 24%, and college basketball at 23%.
Baseball grew in popularity from the 55+ age group (38%) to the 18-34 age group (23%). So was the NFL (49% to 35%).
In the 18-34 age group, baseball still ranks second, tied with the NBA at 23%, followed closely by college football at 22% and college basketball at 20%. Football followed at 16%, although Ipsos VP Mallory Newall said the differences between all of these sports were not statistically significant given the margin of error.
In the 35-54 age group, the NFL led at 46%, followed by baseball at 31%.
Overall, ice hockey was fifth with 18% and soccer sixth with 17%. Football did not score more than 20% in any of the three demographic breakdowns.
Source: LA Times