As baseball games lengthen, their late start times have been a source of frustration for a certain segment of fans, especially those who are legitimately concerned about the decline in the popularity of the sport among the younger generations. Postseason games that start at 8 p.m. on a school night seem almost designed to alienate future fans. And that was all before the pandemic hit.
Now, many people are trapped at home all day, eager for virtual entertainment. There are few trips to make and there is no possibility of attending the games in person. Major League Baseball wasted an opportunity to be the only major American sport on televisions for a captive audience for most of this summer, a botched blow that was supposed to help the game regain some ground in the national popularity contest. And when the season finally started last week, most of the first releases were still at the 7 o’clock hour.
Unlike the NBA and NHL, which are amazing games throughout the day as they resume play this week, baseball largely sticks to a traditional starting time despite the unprecedented lack of structure in the rest of our lives right now.
Baseball games (at least this year) should start in
– Hannah Keyser (@HannahRKeyser) July 7, 2020
A completely informal poll suggests that fans would agree to push the first pitch, and as a baseball-watching person I’d love a league-wide schedule that allows me to watch live baseball action from mid-afternoon until I go to sleep. . (I never mastered the multi-game simul-watch and you can draw conclusions about my social life from that previous sentence, but I stick with it.)
Still, I’m skeptical of the instinctive assumption that the multi-billion dollar baseball industry is run by idiots who never considered the innovation that could make them even more money. So why didn’t MLB advance some of the start times to create a tiered schedule like the NBA and NHL?
“I think the answer is that no one is willing to experiment right now,” said Patrick Crakes, a former Fox Sports programming executive who is now a media consultant.
“The obvious answer to all reasons in professional sports and amateur sports is money,” said Dennis Deninger, a former ESPN production executive who is now a professor of sports communication at Syracuse University.
Ultimately, it’s a bit tricky to show why, in the midst of establishing health and safety protocols for hundreds of people and negotiating a pay structure for the coronavirus-shortened season, baseball teams didn’t seek to shake up their TV product, either. Radical reprogramming in basketball and hockey is largely the result of circumstance. Condensed schedules and limited facilities within the bubbles those sports erected to protect their players forced teams to coordinate their start times around each other.
Even with fans limited to watching television during the coronavirus pandemic, most MLB games continue with the usual local 7pm starting times. (Curtis Compton / Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Baseball, playing at local and inherently more regional stadiums, had no such need. And there is no centralized governance of start times.
In baseball, the commissioner’s office does not have unilateral programming power. Or really, a lot of programming power.
As long as they abide by the Collective Bargaining Agreement (which includes a number of stipulations to protect players from too tight a change), teams set start times together with regional sports networks that broadcast their games for local fans.
“Baseball is a little different than the NBA or NHL in that its regular-season economy is highly regionalized,” said Crakes. “And therefore RSNs and teams are trying to find the best way to maximize that value and keep the start times where they are going to be next year is probably the decision.”
Basically, there is no global organizing force that motivates Major League Baseball to create an all-day baseball schedule. Each team only looks for the best for their fans and their RSN. According to Crakes, people who buy packages outside the market like MLB.TV are an “extremely loud but extremely extreme minority.”
“Because the whole economy doesn’t flow directly to the consumer, and they won’t,” Crakes said, “they flow from the RSN.”
While television audiences are across the board during the 2020 quasi-quarantine, primetime is called primetime for a reason: Most television eyeballs are still found in the hours after dinner. In fact, Crakes explains, the young adult male demo has been watching television later and later in recent years.
“And from a marketing perspective, we have decades of these games at 7 pm,” said Crakes.
But that doesn’t explain why the teams aren’t taking this already anomalous season as an opportunity to attract new and younger viewers. Daytime baseball all week long could become a date to see kids trapped at home and looking for entertainment.
He cited a recent round of broadcast renewals in astronomical numbers as proof that, financially speaking, the league will be fine for the next decade.
“However, sometime in 10 years, if your average viewer is 65, believe me, no one is going to renew at these prices,” Deninger said. “Because 65-year-olds have discovered just about everything they want to buy in the world, and you can’t convince them to try this new light beer or this new hard lemonade.”
If baseball’s demographic core gets too old to attract advertisers, then league decision makers could begin to feel the financial repercussions of not growing the game when they had the chance.
Ultimately, the short season means that each game is literally worth more. The teams are desperate to give their broadcast partners what the RSNs are paying for. And that’s the largest possible amount of eyeballs on the market in over 60 games. Amazing games throughout the day to benefit baseball omnivores who buy the MLB.TV bundle or potentially attract new fans just don’t pay the bills.
