IVAN TORRES
Special to The Leader
Over the years, the MLB has failed to bring any excitement into the league. The league has failed to market their players and change the pace of the game, or to change rules to make the game more exciting.
If you want to make the claim that baseball is not a dying sport, you’re delusional.
Since 2012, ticket sales in the league have declined by over 11 million, according to the New York Times. Not only that, but the last game of the World Series this year compared to last year saw a dropoff of 10 million viewers.
So why is the MLB seeing a steady decline in ticket sales and World Series views?
A very popular reason is the “Trout vs Brady” argument.
For those who don’t know, these are arguably the best players in their respective sports — Tom Brady being referred to as the greatest of all time in American football and Mike Trout arguably being the best player in Major League Baseball.
According to a study by ESPN, 100 percent of counties in the U.S. air at least a quarter of Brady’s games. Only one percent of counties in the U.S. air at least a quarter of Trout’s games.
How is this even possible?
It all comes down to broadcasting.
Big broadcasting companies such as ESPN, CBS and FOX own the broadcasting rights to the NFL.
This leads to more national exposure of games because these are channels everyone has access to.
According to the New York Times, baseball broadcasting works differently: “Individual teams sell exclusive rights for nearly all of their games to either regional branches of these national networks or to local stations.”
Another reason for the decline is how slow and how long one game of baseball takes.
According to Baseball Reference, the duration of an MLB game has increased at a steady pace. From 1946 to 2020 the average duration of a game has increased by over an hour.
Unless you’re a die-hard baseball fan, who would willingly put themselves through three hours of a sport that has so many commercial breaks and intermissions?
In case you don’t know, there are 162 games per season in the MLB.
It’s a lot to handle for a viewer.
The MLB seasons are so long that many fans have suggested shortening the season. However, according to Bleacher Report, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred stated,“I think that Anthony [Rizzo]’s comments were realistic in the sense that he linked the fact that if, in fact, you’re going to go to 154 games or some lower number of games, that players would have to be participants in that process…They’re going to work less, they’re probably going to make less.”
Unless every player is okay with losing out on potentially $100,000 or more for a shortened season, the idea of it seems impossible.
Over the years, several ideas have been pitched to make the MLB more entertaining.
One idea was to enforce the pitch clock which should only take 12 seconds. However, according to FanGraphs, it takes over 12 more seconds between pitches. A slight adjustment like that could save half an hour.
Overall, it’ll be interesting to see how the league adjusts to the negative ratings and decline in sales.