They said baseball was dying. How Rob Manfred and MLB officials revived it.
NEW YORK — No sport reveres statistics more than baseball, and no statistic could have been more alarming for the sport than this one: In 2017, the Sports Business Journal reported the average age of a fan watching a baseball game on television was 57 years old.
It was one number in a sport drowning in numbers. But it was the one number that indicated the sport itself could be drowning. If your average fan can order from the senior menu at Denny's, your past might look better than your future.
No sport is guaranteed a vibrant future. A century ago, the top three sports in America were baseball, boxing and horse racing. The latter two sports are close to dead today, and maybe there was something to that "baseball is dying" chorus.
"You have to continue to capture the next generation, or it is an existential threat to the sport," Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, told me this spring.
"As much as we love the thought that we are the national pastime, I think resting on your laurels is a really bad business strategy."
One strategy would have been to double down on the core audience, to slowly transition into a niche sport, something along the lines of Major League Soccer. A loyal fan base that
