Craig Calcattera gets the MLB way of making money:
Major League Baseball’s dirty secret — though it’s less “dirty” than “smart,” even if they’ll never admit to it — is that they don’t really mind if they don’t “gain notice in a crowded field” like that. Sure, they’d love it if it happened, but MLB has, shrewdly in my mind, decided that if it can’t be a national consensus like football, it will maximally exploit that fragmentation and make a lot of money off it. The reason Fox has launched Fox Sports 1, for example, is to take advantage of that fragmentation. It willingly overpaid MLB for the right to put playoff games there in order to boost the fledgling network. If MLB cared about mass appeal over the bottom line, it’d offer the World Series to all of the networks for free. Everyone would watch then! It prefers to take the billions from cable companies, however.
Prices convey information, information about value, scarcity, demand, etc. The fact that MLB can get a high price for their product indicates they are doing something of value. There’s nothing wrong with tweaking the game from time-to-time to keep it from going too far in one direction, whether that’s controlling the average runs per game or how long it takes to play nine innings. For all the complaints, however, people still watch and listen, and the networks are willing to pay for those eyeballs and ears..
The non-stop Viagra commercials are a reminder about baseball demographics. The sport appeals to the nostalgia of aging men, but who will replace us as we die off? Putting the playoffs on obscure cable channels, late at night for half the country, while lengthening the game with extra commercials, is an excellent way to discourage children from becoming baseball fans.
I inherited my baseball allegiance from my father. But my sons follow League of Legends, which is consciously designed as a sport, complete with professional commentary and analysis, but without commercials, close-ups of graybeards compulsively spitting, or four-hour games.
It’s hard to fault the MLB owners’ (and Selig’s) strategy from a short-term profit-maximizing point of view: they’re getting the most they can now with the intention of selling out before it’s too late. But by pursuing that strategy, they’re accelerating the sport’s decline in popularity.