Not too long ago, America’s Pastime was in danger of being left in the past. As recently as 2017, Major League Baseball attendance had dropped in four out of five years with more than half the league experiencing year-over-year declines. Youth participation was plummeting and the median age for fans watching from home had risen to 57. And you don’t need sabermetrics to know that an aging fan base with no incoming crop to replace it can be a death sentence. So in 2023, MLB did something it hadn’t done in a generation.
It changed.
The league implemented new rules to make games faster, more engaging, and more entertaining. And while they haven’t gone full-on Savannah Bananas, the changes have worked. The league set attendance, viewership, engagement, and revenue records in 2023, earning it the Sports Business Journal’s League of the Year honors in May. Now, at the 2024 season’s midpoint, the league is ahead of last year’s pace in several key metrics and poised for another record-breaking campaign.
Here’s how baseball saved itself, and in the process, began writing a case study in reinvention.
Changing the game
At the end of the last decade, with social media compressing attention spans and highlight culture breeding fans that crave more action, fan feedback was clear: Baseball games take too long, and there’s not enough excitement.
Baseball is a sport that treasures its past, reveres its legends, and cherishes its records. That’s why, while it was clear that changes were necessary, purists balked at rule changes that promoted more offense, which could put some of the game’s revered records at risk. So MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred proceeded with caution, testing out various rules at the minor league level before implementing the first wave of changes in 2023.
Those changes included a pitch clock (similar to the NBA’s shot clock) to speed up the game, enforcing a limit on defensive shifts to allow for more offense, and increasing the size of the bases by three square inches.
Game-changing impact
The impact was almost immediate. These changes reduced average game times by 24 minutes compared to 2022, while both base hits and stolen bases increased. Fan interest also grew, as attendance rose nearly 10% year-over-year, the highest increase in 30 years.
The league also implemented schedule changes in 2023. For the first time ever, each of the league’s 30 teams played each other at least once, regardless of league or division. With each team visiting more markets than ever, ticket sales totaled a record $3.8 billion, up half a billion dollars from the previous year. The league reported $11.34 billion in total revenue for 2023, surpassing the record set in 2022 by more than $1 billion.
The momentum persists in 2024. At the season’s halfway point, total attendance is up 2.5% over 2023, with more than half a million more total fans. The at-home audience is also growing. Ratings are up as much as 8% across Fox, FS1, and ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball, while MLB Network has seen an 11% bump.
Growing younger, growing globally
As engagement rises, MLB’s core demographic is skewing younger.
The league is up 23% in the crucial 18-34 demo across nationally televised games so far in 2024, while the percentage of ticket buyers aged 18-35 has jumped 10.5% since 2019. The median age of ticket purchasers is down from 51 to 44 in that same span.
The audience is also growing globally. The 2023 World Baseball Classic (which is run by MLB) generated about $100 million in revenue, and the championship game between the U.S. and Japan more than doubled the previous viewership record. In 2024, MLB opened the season with a three-game series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres in Seoul, South Korea, featuring Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani.
That was in March. Through the end of April, MLB viewership in South Korea remained up 54%.
Later in the season, a series in Mexico City prompted an 81% increase in viewership in Mexico’s capital, while a series in London contributed to MLB UK social channels’ 45% growth in 2024.
All this is to say that, both at home and abroad, baseball appears to be having a bit of a moment.
“We tried to listen to our fans,” Manfred told the Sports Business Journal. “If you think about it, we changed our game—we changed the way it was played. Our players adjusted. It was almost seamless, and we owe them a debt on that. We put what we regard to be the best form of our game on the field every day.”
Problem solved?
Amid audience, revenue, and other records, perhaps MLB’s greatest victory is its newfound identity. Historically, the league has been steeped in tradition and resistant to change—in many cases, to its own detriment.
Now, the Manfred-era MLB appears to be one of innovation and possibility.
The league is revolutionizing broadcasting with players mic’d up in-game, having conversations with the in-booth announcers during live play, sometimes while a play is happening on the field. In addition to strategically scheduled international series, the league has found a way to eventize other regular season games, creating periodic spectacles throughout an otherwise long, drawn-out 162-game season.
In 2021, the league started a new tradition, playing an annual game in Dyersville, Iowa, on the field featured in the 1989 film Field of Dreams. Just last month, as a tribute to the Negro Leagues, baseball legend Willie Mays, and to celebrate Juneteenth, MLB hosted a game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama—the oldest professional ballpark in the U.S. and where Mays played for the Negro Leagues’ Birmingham Black Barons.
This came on the heels of MLB announcing that it would incorporate Negro League stats into its record books, introducing more than 2,300 players into the league’s archives.
It was a decision that celebrates baseball’s past while simultaneously muddying it, all in the interest of moving into the future.
That’s the new MLB. It’s tinkering. It’s taking chances. It’s more open to change than ever before. And that’s what it will need to continue competing with the revenue juggernaut that is the NFL, the cultural relevance of the NBA, and the momentum of MLS, the WNBA, and other major sports leagues fighting for fans’ affinity, attention, and dollars.
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