Younger fans a parallel to what we're seeing in younger collectors?
 

Won't sit well with the "baseball is a dying game" crowd. Nope.

I think they're going to have to get used to it!

MLB has done a great job with outreach to younger audiences over the years. Not all of it has been on TV, so it may get missed by some.

Highlights on social media are pumped heavily to people. There's a lot more advertising in local markets when stars are showing up for clinics/exhibitions/etc. The people roped into watching 30-90 second clips of impressive plays seem to be getting turned on to the game.

The parks themselves, especially minor league parks, have a -lot- of interactive youth exhibits. Kids being bored as hell at the ballpark for 3 hours have a lot more things to do to break up the time.

Baseball seems to have successfully currently branded itself as fun rather than boring.

As mentioned prior, baseball has done an amazing job of becoming a family activity. The affordable fun of minor league stadiums and other sub leagues have made it a more approachable game to build family memories with as others become more prohibitive to attend.

Took my son to CitiField recently to see a Mets game. Just wasn't in the mood to drop a lot of money on tickets, and bought two tickets in the upper tier for $24 each. Where are you going to beat that? Under $50 for two people to get in the door. I could do that for 10 games and it would be less than one lousy concert seat at an arena to see a band.



QUOTE=JustinD;2429487]As mentioned prior, baseball has done an amazing job of becoming a family activity. The affordable fun of minor league stadiums and other sub leagues have made it a more approachable game to build family memories with as others become more prohibitive to attend.[/QUOTE]

Ah crap, just when you think the price of card board was going to be going down... :p

Totally anecdotal on my end, but a lot of what I've seen with kids (highschool and younger) around my area is it's a price-limiting hobby for busting packs and they tend to have parents with more disposable income.

It's not a bad thing, but it's skewed enough to notice that a lot of the kids opening new product aren't scraping up allowance money saved for weeks to pick up stuff.

$3 a pack on the low end and the "good stuff" costing much more is a hell of a barrier. New/hot stuff is insane. Shops are doing pre-sales on packs...on packs...$10+/pack for 2024 Bowman is common and the price probably won't drop when the product hits shelves.

I'm not a member of that crowd, but getting our facts from MLB isn't the best place, they treated Ippei Mizuhara much like the Brady Bunch treated cousin Oliver.

If you grow up with the love of Baseball it never will go away..

Speeding up the game and cutting out a lot of the bs time wasting has been huge. Such a better product.

+1 Big time! A lot of the new rules I have no use for, but my gosh have they made this a better game to watch with the pitch clock. Takes me back to the two hour games of my youth. My Mom, a refined and mild-mannered lady, became a huge baseball fan in her latter years, and she would yell at the TV, "Throw the ball!" I've always said it's not the length of the games, it's the pace. Me and my buddies used to love Sunday doubleheaders in the bleachers (75 cents!) at Griffith Stadium, and I'll bet we were out no more than six hours including round trip on the bus and streetcar. And man, did we love extra-inning games, the longer the better.

Fixed it for you... :D

Couple of things

1) The pace of game is really important. The new Rangers ballpark has a roof and thus the temperature is moderated unlike the old days where you could be outside in 100 degree weather for hours

And let me tell you, if you sat at either previous ballpark in Arlington, you knew you were going to be in 3 plus hours in that heat. No fun. The pitch clock helps that and it's velocity not the pitch clock causing the pitching injury issues. ESPN just had an article which basically verified that assumption.

2) I'm lucky here in East Plano to be about 15-20 minutes from the Frisco Roughriders ballpark. Lot closer than Arlington, lot less expensive and I don't worry about staying till the end of any game. In fact, although we never could figure out the answer with their game day programs to have what I wanted for my birthday, I spent a good 45 minutes at the Dr. Pepper Field with one of the sales reps just chatting baseball. No way a major league team does that for you.

3) another thing baseball does need to figure out is to fix the Regional Sports Networks (RSN) or local cable issue. It's too difficult to figure out how to watch Rangers games since 2020 when Bally's was dropped by my cable company.

4) And the final thing baseball needs to do is to fix their blackout rules for MLB.TV. The blackout areas are too expansive. I know someone in Austin Texas who is blacked out from watching the Houston Astros (not sure about the Rangers in his case). The radius of the blackout should be smaller.

Regards
Rich

they missed:

5. GAMBLING - from full season fantasy leagues to traditional sports betting to one day fantasy or prop betting and the fact that the even the casual viewing public is being beaten over the head with gambling advertising, more young people have, mistakenly, seen baseball as a path to riches with no labor.

I live in Japan and have two elementary school age kids. The main maker of baseball cards here sells them for about 75 cents a pack. Those packs come with a bag of potato chips and you can buy them almost anywhere - supermarkets, convenience stores, etc. No price gouging anywhere.

That easy accessability to kids makes a massive difference. We collect the set together each year and they are extremely into them. We buy them whenever we go shopping, and I can easily afford to bring them home from work for them whenever I feel like it. We have a paper checklist, keep our cards in a small shoebox, don’t care when cards get dinged corners, get excited when we pull cards of our favorite team, throw the cards of our least favorite team on the floor in disgust when we pull them and just have fun with it.

If we lived in the US none of that would be possible and my kids probably wouldn’t be interested in baseball cards at all. Expensive hobbies lose a lot of fun with every dollar that gets pumped into them. I love the simplicity of collecting over here….

I live in an area where WAS + BAL are blackout areas. There are 0 over-the-air, cable, satellite, or streaming options to get WAS or BAL games in my area. Even if you wanted to throw money at the problem to see the games, nope.

The blackout rules are insanely strict. As weird as they can be in California, if you're in Guam then you're in SF/OAK blackout territory...because whatever.

I live 300 miles from Seattle. The Mariners are blacked on MLB.TV for me.

+100% the corporate embracing of gambling on sports will ruin many lives. Well done Manfred.

Gambling seems like a societal issue. But sure blame Manfred for it. All the other major sports leagues have shunned it, right? NFL? NBA?

I coach Little League near Boston, and our league received cases of 2024 Topps this year (for the first time), directly from Topps. Every coach was given enough packs to distribute a pack to each player.

It was fun to watch the excitement among all of the kids as they opened the packs, shared cards with friends, etc.

I don't know how widespread this effort was by Topps to get cards directly into the hands of kids, but it was very well-received among the kids I saw that got them!

Really? I had no problem getting Nats games on cable (Verizon's Fios) when I lived in Arlington, VA, and have no problem getting them (Xfinity) now that I'm 80 miles away in Winchester, VA. Are you telling me that the games are blacked out in the entire D.C. area now? How can they make any money on the TV rights, then? And that's not going to help get fans interested. I don't get it.

Manfred works at the behest of his corporate masters, he as about as much power to make decisions to the overall workings of MLB as any of us do, he gets paid the big bucks to be the face of the blame.

I live in Manassas, VA. and I have cable via Verizon's Fios. I get all of the Nationals and Orioles games on MASN.

I'm in North Carolina. It's BAL/WAS region until you get to Charlotte, NC area in the south of the state (ATL).

The amount of BAL/WAS fans here are very few, so it doesn't upset too many.