Is Baseball in Trouble?

Those of you who have bothered to tune into any of the playoffs this season have probably noticed a series of strange ads featuring, “the Moon.”

In these spots, the Moon—billed as "Lou Nar, the Moon Man," a person wearing a moon-head that makes him look a little like Mr. Met, save for the sad eyes and fixed, rictus grin of the Queens-based mascot—complains about how many “moonshots” players keep hitting at him.

Weirdly, though, the ad ends up being for MLB’s…first cryptocurrency! 

You read that right. The Lords of the Game now have their very own bitcoin, something called “FTX.” 

In some of the ads, Big Papi even joins in. Yeah, that’s perfect. A fraud and a cheat advertising a financial instrument that’s about as reliable as the promises of an online, “Nigerian prince.”  

For that matter, MLB has also gone all in on a partnership with online gambling.

Hmm. Cryptocurrencies and online gambling. What could possibly go wrong?

One has to wonder if these decisions reflect a certain, growing desperation within the Valhalla of MLB’s reigning deities. Is the game in financial trouble?

The attendance figures certainly don’t look good. Major-league baseball’s total attendance this year was something like 45 million, a 37-year low—though one that can easily be attributed to Covid.

Even before the pandemic, however, total attendance was tilting steadily downward, dropping from an all-time high of nearly 79.5 million in 2007  to just 68.5 million in 2019—before the pandemic.

That’s a drop of about 14 percent, from nearly 33,000 a game to just over 28,000.

(Your New York Yankees, incidentally, plunged from an all-time attendance high of 4,298,655 in 2008, to just 3,304,404 in 2019, a drop of over 23 percent. This was no doubt partly because of the team’s decision to deliberately shrink its seating capacity in Yankee Stadium III, in favor of more luxury boxes. But it still means many fewer fans.)

When confronted with such blatant evidence of its plummeting popularity, MLB likes to point to its lucrative television contracts, or such bold new sources of revenue as selling broadcast rights to your phone. 

Or its deals to sell you cryptocurrency. Or to turn you into a gambling addict. (What’s next? Naming the official narco-trafficker of the New York Yankees?)

But it’s highly doubtful that broadcast figures can be very good, either.

After all, the highest ratings for any major-league baseball series, ever, came in the 1978 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers, which had a rating of 32.8 and a share of 56. 

In other words, almost a third of all American households—and over half with a TV on—an estimated 44,278,950 viewers in all—watched Reggie and the gang flatten the Bums. 

The 2020 Series ratings? An all-time low, at a 5.2 rating, 12 share, and 9,785,000 viewers. Ouch.  

And don’t count on this fall’s less-than-classic classic bringing those figures back up very much.

In other words, baseball on TV has gone from its very best performance to its very worst over the last 43 years—nearly a half-century of almost constant decline. The last time any World Series game drew so much as a 30 rating was in 1991.

So steadily dropping numbers in television viewing and attendance. Yeah, keep telling yourself things are going well, o lords of the game. And now, here is Vladimir Putin to sell you wonderful new Russian vaccines, courtesy of MLB…