Nevius: Baseball goes looking for its fans

Major League Baseball is freaking out.

The league suddenly is very, very concerned about the joy and happiness of its paying customers. All around the country, major efforts are being made to be sure the ballpark experience is a pleasurable one.

How serious are they? Well, the Giants lowered the price of beer by $5. You can’t get much more serious than that.

It is, of course, all about baseball attendance, which has been on the slide for a while.

Last year’s leaguewide attendance was down 6% from 2019. (Since 2020 and 2021 were affected by COVID, 2019 is the best regular-season comparison.) Last year 23 of 30 MLB teams experienced a drop in attendance.

And it isn’t just recent history. Forbes says Major League Baseball attendance has dropped for nine straight years — not including 2020, when spectators were cardboard cutouts.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it is that baseball teams are extremely dependent on ticket sales for their financial health.

In 2019, Forbes estimated that the average team was getting 29% of its income from gate receipts and 17% from concessions and parking. Put those two together and 46% of a baseball team’s revenue is the direct result of how many butts are in the seats.

Hence, the sudden enthusiasm for dramatic rule changes. Previously, some of the new game-changers might have been considered wild, pie-in-the-sky leaps of logic.

Now, you say the game is too slow? Here is a pitch clock, shaving 20-30 minutes off game time.

Not enough action? MLB has banned the defensive shift, increasing the likelihood of more hits, more base runners and more runs.

They also increased the size of the bases.

For some reason.

I may be proved wrong, but I don’t see how larger bases are going to increase the number of steals. But we will see.

The point is, baseball is saying we HEAR you. We’ve gotten the message.

The Giants are a good local example. Twenty-three years ago, the team built a trendy new ballpark right on the water.

Attendance soared, as it did in other cities that erected “modern” ballparks. From October 2010 to July 2017, the Giants boasted of 530 consecutive sellouts. Sixteen of 23 seasons in the new ballyard were sold out.

But attendance has declined the last six seasons (not including 2020). Last year's per-game, regular-season average of 30,650 was the lowest since Oracle Park opened.

Even in 2021, when the team registered a remarkable 107 wins, attendance was the least since they moved to the new ballpark. (There were some COVID restrictions that year, but even so.)

The team has reacted. It’s fun to joke about lowering the beer price, but they are serious. People have been griping about the cost of a cup of suds at Giants games — $14 until this year — for years. And to be fair, according to Statisa, it was one of the highest prices in baseball.

The Giants are also aggressively marketing ticket deals, like $5 tickets for April and May games. Or “flex plans” that give ticket-buyers options. They host days when you can get silly hats, bobbleheads and T-shirts.

All of that is laser-focused on getting paying customers to the ballpark.

(We’d mention the A’s, but it seems like they have pretty much given up. Last year, amid rumors of moving to Las Vegas, they fell below one million in attendance, down 53% from the pre-COVID year of 2019.)

But wait, you say, don’t baseball teams make major money from televising their games?

Grab your pith helmet — we’re about to go into the weeds.

The answer to that is yes — previously.

As we know, baseball does not draw well on national television. For instance, the 2020 World Series attracted 9.78 million viewers. Back in 2001, the World Series drew twice that, over 24 million people.

However ...

Major League Baseball has always had an ace in the hole — regional sports networks.

This is the idea that Bay Area viewers might not be interested in the Orioles vs. the Red Sox, but they would like to see every Giants game.

Regional sports networks filled that role. They televised every game and, in exchange, fees were bundled in cable TV packages, like DirecTV. Cable subscribers paid an extra amount, perhaps $5-7 a month, for the sports network.

And it was wildly successful. Big corporations bought up the regional sports networks. RSNs not only included baseball; they were often showing the local NBA and NHL teams.

Diamond Sports Group owns 19 networks, which televise some 42 professional teams. The group purchased the networks from Fox Sports for $9.6 billion in 2019, and initially the networks made millions for Diamond.

But what few saw coming was a nationwide trend to cut the cable on paid television and go to streaming services. Once people realized that didn’t mean watching games on a tiny laptop screen, but on a full, digital TV, the rush to leave paid cable was on.

It would be safe to say regional sports networks are getting clobbered. The Diamond Group is expected to declare bankruptcy and other owners of multiple RSNs, like AT&T SportsNet, are getting out of the business.

For teams, the effect is dire. The Sports Business Journal estimates that revenue could go from $30 million to $8 million per team.

Now, that won’t mean that games won’t be available. There are proposals for leagues to take over streaming broadcasting, which will leave the local crews in place.

But coordinating how that might work, with internet services still new, is not going to be easy. Hardly anyone seems to know how it will play out.

In the meantime, Major League Baseball is adjusting, changing and hoping to keep old fans and attract new ones. For now, the focus is on the fans, until the TV logistics can be worked out.

In the meantime, it is probably a good time to sit back and grab a beer.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cw.nevius@pressdemocrat.com. Twitter: @cwnevius