Credit Photograph by Stephen Dunn / Getty
The New York Yankees opened the 2015 season with a dispiriting 6—1 loss at home, but perhaps more dispiriting, to the team and to Major League Baseball, was the absence of one man: Derek Jeter, who retired last year after two decades as the Yankees’ shortstop and the league’s unassailable marquee player. While there is a new crop of young players who combine spectacular on-field performances with appealing personalities, none has reached quite the same level of star power—something M.L.B. is hoping to change.
At the height of his popularity, Jeter earned nine million dollars a year in endorsements from the likes of Nike, Gatorade, Ford, and Movado; he regularly topped lists of the most powerful, the most marketable, and the most recognizable professional athletes in the world. Today, Mike Trout is the only active baseball player to crack the top ten on those lists, whether the metrics use on-field performance coupled with social-media presence, or a secret stew of marketing value. None of the lists include players such as Giancarlo Stanton, who regularly hits four-hundred-and-fifty-foot home runs for the Miami Marlins, or Clayton Kershaw, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ lefty ace who has won the National League Cy Young Award in three of the past four years.
This lack of individual star power hasn’t hurt baseball financially—not yet, at least. Attendance has stayed steady for the past five years, at around seventy-three million tickets sold a year (down from a high of 79.5 million in 2007). League revenues topped eight billion dollars in 2013 and neared nine billion last year, thanks in large part to lucrative local and national media-rights deals. And when fans weren’t at the ballpark last season, they set television-rating records at home: eleven teams ranked first in prime time in their local markets, beating out every other show on broadcast or cable; six additional teams ranked in the top three.
But despite all the love teams feel in their local markets, and despite all the money that love brings in, baseball has lost its way in the national sports landscape. The N.F.L. dominates on TV, and not just with the Super Bowl. Last season’s opening game, between the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers, captured about twenty-seven million viewers, almost twice the average viewership for last year’s seven-game World Series, between the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals. TV ratings are just one measure of a sport’s popularity, of course: ratings for the World Series have dropped precipitously since 1991, when thirty-six million fans tuned in, but total revenues have quadrupled during the same time period.
The problem is who is—or, more to the point, who isn’t—watching. Baseball fans are, on average, older than the fans of other major sports. Baseball’s share of television viewers between the ages of six and seventeen has fallen to less than five per cent in recent postseasons—it was nearly double that a decade ago. It’s true that kids are spending more time on mobile devices these days, and watching less television over all; but when they do tune in, it tends not to be to baseball. Participation in Little League and other youth baseball programs is also on the decline, and eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds are fourteen per cent less likely to declare an interest in baseball compared to the over-all population, according to Nielsen Scarborough. Major League Baseball is concerned about losing its connection with kids, and not just because baseball is a game with a rich history, handed down from one generation to the next. Today’s kids are tomorrow’s consumers. If kids are turning away from baseball now, there will be fewer adults to buy tickets, merchandise, and cable-TV packages in the future.
Trying to counter this trend, the league unveiled a slew of new ads on Opening Day, featuring the game’s young stars. In one thirty-second spot, Mike Trout signs autographs for a throng of kids. You can hear them telling Trout, “You’re the greatest baseball player,” and “You’re my favorite.” In another, the Detroit Tigers pitcher David Price makes his way through a crowd of adoring young fans, hugs one, and, in a voiceover, says, “If I can make kids happy, that’s what I’m trying to do.”
The star-driven marketing campaign is part of a larger effort by Rob Manfred, baseball’s new commissioner, to reëngage with kids. “Promoting the game’s top players is an important priority for M.L.B. moving forward,” Matt Bourne, a league spokesperson, told me. The league is engaged in a full-court press to raise the profile of the next wave of stars in a post-Jeter world.
“It’s very important to have stars that transcend their local markets,” Larry Baer said. Baer is the president and C.E.O. of the San Francisco Giants, the team that’s won the World Series in three of the last five seasons. “When you have the jewel events [like the World Series], you don’t want fans turning off the TV if their teams aren’t in it. It’s a challenge for baseball because we are the most tribal sport,” Baer added. “It’s important, for the national footprint of the sport, to have players who transcend. Jeter clearly did.”
One of Jeter’s would-be successors is San Francisco’s Buster Posey. As the starting catcher for the team since midway through the 2010 season, Posey has spearheaded the Giants’ three championships. He won the National League Rookie of the Year Award, in 2010, and the league’s Most Valuable Player Award, in 2012. Posey displays a quiet confidence on the field, in a way that evokes comparisons to Jeter. And with his boyish good looks, he seems primed to ascend to similar levels of popularity and marketability. But it hasn’t happened yet.
“No league can do it by itself. You need to have partnerships with sponsors,” said Baer. “You see the N.F.L. and N.B.A. use sponsors in that way, pretty successfully.” Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of his generation, but it was Nike and Gatorade that made him a household name. But the gruelling baseball schedule—a hundred and sixty-two games in a hundred and eighty-three days—leaves little time for shooting commercials and participating in promotions the way that N.F.L. and N.B.A. stars do during their seasons, Manfred has noted.
So M.L.B. shot footage during spring training for its ad campaign, which will air during national broadcasts on Fox and ESPN. “We think it’s the biggest platform for us, it’s where we have the biggest reach, and we’re trying to take advantage of that,” Manfred told the Post. But if kids aren’t watching the World Series on national TV, you have to wonder if they’re watching Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN, particularly when the games start at 8 P.M. on the East Coast.
Baseball’s drive to create the next Derek Jeter is understandable. Jeter represented excellence on the field and avoided trouble off it (despite the best efforts of New York tabloids). He drew people to the game, whether you rooted for the Yankees or not. But Jeter wasn’t a media creation. He was a great player fortunate enough to play in New York during a time when the Yankees were perennial postseason contenders. On the biggest stage, he propelled the Yankees to five World Series championships with iconic home runs and game-saving plays that will live on in highlight reels forever.
Other than Posey, few of the game’s young stars have played October baseball. Trout and Kershaw are exceptions, but they both gave forgettable, uninspiring performances in the postseason. M.L.B. is trying to evoke greatness and inspire growth with ads, but without organic touchstone moments to build on. It’s a feel-good campaign for a league that feels good about its present. The future is another story.
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated ballpark-attendance figures in dollars, not number of tickets.
