By next season, Bud Selig, the second longest serving commissioner in Major League Baseball history, will be replaced by the MLB’s Chief Operating Officer, Rob Manfred.
“Who?”
That’s a fair question to ask of anyone behind the scenes in the commissioner’s office. Manfred assumed the office of COO in 2013 and was Selig’s hand picked selection to become the tenth commissioner of baseball. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Manfred began working with the league’s collective bargaining agreements, most notably counseling the owners during the crippling 1994 player’s strike. Manfred also played a key role in designing MLB’s current drug suspension policy.
Most recently, Manfred is known as the guy who convinced Selig that New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez should receive a season-long suspension instead of the lifelong suspension the latter wanted to hand down. Manfred has the experience, energy, and support to serve as a very good baseball commissioner.
But he’s not the right man for the job. The best choice would have been the Chief Executive Officer of Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), Robert A. Bowman.
Again, Who??
That’s a fairer question to ask. Regular readers of SportTechie should know that we, here, have a bit of a crush on Bob Bowman and his empire at MLBAM. If you’d like to know more, you can find a good article here. And here. Here, too. We won’t burden you with any more technical details of MLBAM. We’ll instead bring your attention to the MLB’s sobering future.
Major League Baseball has been this country’s steadiest league. In its 145 years of existence (48 years longer than any other major American professional sports league), baseball has been this country’s most or second most popular sport. The MLB has only experienced two labor strikes in its nearly 150-year existence, and currently boasts what many experts call the strongest labor union in the United States. All but three of its 30 teams are valued at over half a billion dollars; and the league has experienced a revenue growth of over 250 percent since the 1994 walkout. All the financial signs point towards a game that will remain healthy for the next century.
But make no mistake: baseball is sick.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the mean age of viewers during last year’s World Series was 54.9 years, up exactly five years of age from only four years before. Viewers under the age of 18 made up only 4.3 percent of the viewership for the National League Championship Series, down from 7.4 percent in 2004. The numbers show that baseball’s core fans are getting old and the younger generation isn’t interested in taking their place. Soccer, football, and basketball have collected the interest of the youth; and the future of baseball looks bleak, with fewer and fewer eyes watching the game.
Theories abound as to why baseball is losing ground with the youth. Ben McGrath of The New Yorker blames baseball’s unwillingness to market its best players. Keith Olbermann points to a calculated move in the 1950s and 60s to eliminate the Yankees as a nationally beloved team. Charlie Pierce simply blames Selig for valuing steady profit over risky showmanship. The truth is probably more convoluted; perhaps a mix of the three and a smattering of other factors form the full picture of the game’s potential demise. The good news for Major League Baseball is that the league already has the tools in place to reverse the trend. They shouldn’t go about it with Manfred as a labor-friendly Selig clone; however, because the answers are coming out of Bowman’s presumably dark office.
MLBAM has nullified complaints that Major League Baseball refuses to embrace technology. Their MLB At-Bat app, which many consider the best app in sports, has been downloaded over 10 million times. Fans universally acknowledge MLB.tv as the pièce de résistance of all streaming services, and have made it the best selling streaming service in the world. MLBAM has been so successful that they’ve outsourced their talents to ESPN, YES Network, WWE Network, and many others. And this doesn’t even take into account their most exciting project to date: their yet unnamed player tracking system that’s so detailed and advanced, that it’s going to take a few years to collect enough data to even know what to make of it.
Bowman’s empire has unexpectedly made Major League Baseball a mostly invisible force in advanced media. His ingenuity and expertise have made him the Elon Musk of the sports world; and baseball needs Bowman’s risk-taking advancements if it wants to survive into the twenty-second century. I won’t argue that the MLB will be saved by his digital revolution; the league’s problems run much deeper than a social media and digital presence. But I will argue that baseball needs to grab the next generation’s attention; and in order to do that, they’re going to need a strong digital media presence, because that’s where all media is going to end up not long from now.
Rob Manfred will do well because baseball is doing well. But Bob Bowman is what the game needs for the future.