I left SXSW fully conflicted about MLB's future
Baseball is getting fun again. Why don't investors want in?
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, Eben discusses the yin and yang of a sport he once loved.
I no longer root for any of the teams I loved as a child. Once I spent a decade reporting on owners, team sales, ticketing and media, I found it impossible to blindly root for any single franchise.
No team, however, has fallen from my radar quite like the New York Mets. As a child I watched 100+ Mets games a year. I wore my Rey Ordóñez jersey with pride, and on summer nights I bit my nails to every Armando Benítez ninth inning. I was obsessed. When the Mets made the World Series in 2015, I was early in my career at Bloomberg and had a press pass to attend games. That would have thrilled 15-year-old me. Instead, I didn’t go to a single game. The passion was totally gone.
For the past decade, my growing apathy for the sport has been fueled by some fairly obvious fault lines in baseball’s underlying business. The demographics are too old; there are no mainstream stars; valuations aren’t keeping pace with other leagues; the spending imbalance has sapped the sport of parity; too many owners aren’t trying to win; the decline of regional sports networks might cripple the sport. Many of those tropes are exaggerated, sure, but there’s also truth in every one.
This weekend, however, at the Sportico House at SXSW in Austin, I experienced a mini baseball revival. On Tuesday I was on a panel with Jomboy Media COO Courtney Hirsch, who spoke at length about the many different parts of their business. I was obviously familiar with Jomboy’s viral video breakdowns, but Hirsch detailed a much broader re-packaging of the sport.
A few years ago, for example, they built a video series called Sequence, where former MLB infielder Trevor Plouffe broke down individual at-bats in granular detail. I watched a few on the flight back to New York. They’re fantastic.
At a time when a sport’s success seems to hinge largely on how much fun it is to be a fan outside of live games, baseball has lagged behind its peers. But Jomboy’s success—particularly with the 18-to-35 year-old fans that are talked about as a dying breed—shows there’s a lot of meat left on the bone. It’s an underserved market, one itching for new ways to talk about MLB.
On Tuesday evening, the Talkin’ Baseball podcast did a 45-minute live show breaking down how the game is changing. They detailed how MLB was slowly emerging from its “three true outcomes” era, and how rules changes like the pitch clock, infield shift and the three-batter-minimum have improved the sport for both fans and players. Baseball was long chastised for being too staid and traditional, but MLB has taken some major swings (sorry) in the last few years, and they’ve largely been home runs (sorry!). At one point, as the Talkin’ Baseball hosts were bouncing around ideas for how to incentivize starting pitchers to go deeper into games, I got a little jealous that similar conversations in other sports—like banning the tush push, for example—are typically far less fun.
Their podcast also made me realize how much I’d actually enjoyed baseball over the past two years. The 2023 World Baseball Classic’s storybook ending was an absolute all-timer. Shohei Ohtani’s run to baseball’s first 50/50 season was electric, as was Tigers ace Tarik Skubal single-handedly dragging his team to a deciding Game 5 in last year’s ALDS. The talent-rich Dodgers throwing ‘bullpen games’ in last year’s World Series reminded me how much fun strategy there is in a sport with that many moving pieces.
For a little more Jomboy love, I thought this breakdown of the cascading effects of a bad challenge was really well done.
Then on Wednesday morning, as I was making calls trying to identify the Boston Celtics bidders, a few of my conversations shifted to the Minnesota Twins. The Twins are also for sale, and from what I understand, things are going slowly. Billionaire Justin Ishbia expressed interest early in the process, but it appears he's pivoted his focus instead to the Chicago White Sox. I haven't heard much about other bidders, and many in our industry believe the team might soon come off the market.
If that happens it would be the third MLB team in the last few years—joining the Washington Nationals and Anaheim Angels—to announce it was for sale then subsequently come off the market without a deal being reached. If three’s a trend, this would be a bad one for MLB.
Most of the baseball teams that have sold in the past decade have been among MLB’s less valuable, and the annual return on those investments have been historically low (see 👆). The average MLB team’s valuation is up 20% in the last three years, vs. 77% in the NBA and 92% in the NHL. Interest from billionaires is hardly the best metric to determine a sport’s overall health, but it’s hard to look at that chart and be too optimistic about where baseball is heading.
The MLB pendulum has swung back for me, now resting somewhere in the middle. Baseball might be dying a slow death, but guess what? Opening Day is next week!
Jacob’s ⚡ Take: There’s a four-quadrant chart to be made here, about the relative enjoyability of a sport and the health of its business. They don’t necessarily go hand in hand, as MLB shows. I wonder what would be in the opposite quadrant (concerns about the game but 📈 on the money side). The NBA? College football?
Programming Note: The Pick Six now comes in a separate post, in your inbox every Saturday AM.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.