Miami Marlins slugger Giancarlo Stanton stares down a baseball. His impressive shoulder muscles gleaming in the bright sunshine and fully exposed in a sleeveless t-shirt, Stanton unleashes his fierce swing on the unsuspecting sphere of leather and cork. The baseball isn’t sent spinning 500 feet through the air, however, like one might see on the many highlight clips that have made Stanton a bit of a folk hero among baseball’s biggest fans. No, on this swing, the baseball travels 20 feet, albeit at a blistering speed, directly into a car window, which as you might have guessed, does not survive the impact. That’s because Giancarlo Stanton isn’t taking batting practice at Miami Marlins stadium. He’s in the middle of a junkyard with MTV personality Melanie Iglesias on MTV2’s new show, “Off the Bat.”
TV segments like Stanton’s are part of the latest push by Major League Baseball to reverse the troubling trends that are dwindling TV ratings. With an average fan age that continues to hover around 44 years old, the MLB is a far cry from the 18-24 age demographic courted by sponsors and television stations across the country.
Much of that work has fallen on the shoulders of the MLB Fan Cave, now in its third season. For the uninitiated, the MLB Fan Cave is a swanky multi-use space in the heart of New York City’s Greenwich Village, in which devoted fans called “cave dwellers” attempt to watch every game of the MLB season while chronicling their journey through blog posts, videos, and social media. Throughout the season, celebrities, athletes, and musical groups stop by to produce original content and put on concerts, while cave dwellers are voted out of the cave one-by-one until a single super fan remains.
This year, MLB has further ramped up its Fan Cave experience with the unlikely combination of technology and MTV2. The MTV2 component comes in the form of the aforementioned “Off the Bat” show, a weekly 30 minute series that features Red Sox slugger David Ortiz as Executive Producer and MTV stalwarts Sway, Fat Joe, Chris Distefano, and Melanie Iglesias as hosts. The show, airing each Tuesday at 11pm, offers a mix of short segments that seek to blend the biggest stars of MLB with pop culture and entertainment. In the first two episodes, “Off the Bat” has featured a trio of fans answering trivia questions about Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper while getting their heads shaved after incorrect answers, Marlins outfielder Giancarlo Stanton hitting baseballs at junkyard cars, and Orioles outfielder Adam Jones in an oversized-doughnut eating contest.
At the surface, the goal of “Off the Bat” is clear. If MLB can feature the brightest young stars of the game to a young, tech savvy, national audience, it can potentially reverse the recent trend of low national TV ratings. The Philadelphia Phillies aren’t likely to make the playoffs this year, but perhaps, through “Off the Bat,” MLB can get fans from Philadelphia to identify with Evan Longoria and Miguel Cabrera enough to watch them and other stars in the playoffs anyway. If fantasy baseball was the beginning of fans caring about individual players rather than their hometown teams, MLB’s Fan Cave and “Off the Bat” in particular show that the MLB is going all in on support for the idea.
If you’re more of a sabermetrician fan, MLB Fan Cave has you covered too via Mission Control, a 20-foot long panel featuring 30 screens, a seemingly endless number of switches, and enough available data to satisfy a NASA scientist. Mission Control, a custom project from Brooklyn-based digital experience firm Breakfast NY, uses over 10 different APIs and six languages to pull live streams from every stadium in the league and conduct player video chats with fans, as well as track real-time relevant social media activity from every stadium and about every team. If you’re more into game data, Mission Control tracks everything from the big stuff like hits, strikeouts, home runs, and stolen bases to the minute details like wind speed, air temperature, and stadium capacity. If there isn’t enough data being tracked through Mission Control to satisfy you, you’re either incredibly unreasonable or lying.
MLB’s numbers suggest that their Fan Cave experiment has been a success. The average age of a Fan Cave fan is 25, and it has more than 2.5 million followers across social media. It has also generated more than 10.5 billion earned media impressions and has more than 40,000 fan applications since its inception. TV Ratings for last year’s postseason were also up – 20% in fact – across FOX, TBS, and MLB Network, a potential signal that interest in MLB and its brightest stars has extended beyond each team’s respective local markets. However, the average World Series viewer in 2013 was 54.4 years old, according to Nielsen, up from 49.9 in 2009, while kids represented just 4.3% of the average audience for the 2013 American and National League Championship Series. That’s hardly the audience MLB is hoping for.
So why the mixed bag of results? Well, while MLB has done an impressive job of marketing its star players to younger tech-savvy millennials while integrating pop culture and gamification elements to the sport, the game of baseball has largely remained the same. The season is incredibly long, the pace of play is slow, and the average length of games has been consistently rising since 2005 and continues to climb in 2014 with the expansion of instant replay. This raises the question, is Major League Baseball working to improve the wrong thing? MLB may be able to keep revenues high through sponsorships and partnerships like the MLB Fan Cave, but will their efforts be enough to offset the harsh reality that is a slow pace of play combined with shorter attention spans?
This year, despite heavy promotion for the MLB Fan Cave and “Off the Bat,” national Opening Night ratings were flat on ESPN from 2013, and down 17% from 2011 and 2012 Opening Night ratings. 2014 also marked the fourth consecutive year that Opening Night ratings were below 2.0 (for comparison’s sake, NBA Opening Night drew a 4.2 overnight rating on TNT in 2013 while the NFL Opening Night earned a 16.2 overnight rating for NBC.) Conversely, Opening Day local ratings were up in several cities across the nation, including Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., Phoenix, and St. Louis.
So is MLB’s millennial push paying off or not? I guess you could say that like a close play at the plate, the call is still under review.
