For MLB, the business of baseball is booming
The start of the 2015 Major League Baseball season is a little more than two weeks away. With the new season comes a new commissioner, and Rob Manfred is coming in at a pretty good time for the sport, financially.
Major League Baseball brought in a record $9 billion in gross revenues for the 2014 calendar year, according to Forbes. That's up from about $8 billion in 2013. The boost in revenue is thanks largely to national and local television contracts, MLB saw revenues double for new broadcast deals with national network partners.
But what about attendance? While the rise in ticket prices at many marquis ballparks has priced families out of the ballpark, the 2014 regular season saw the seventh highest total attendance of all time-- an attendance total of more than 73 million for the season.
Ken Shropshire, author of “Sports Matters: Leadership, Power and the Quest for Respect in Sports” believes baseball has serious staying power. “When we think about the major issues that may exist for a sport, that can bring down a sport...” says Shropshire who is also a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, “there is nothing that has sustained itself in baseball that has been that problematic that it hasn’t been able to shake.”
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That may be in part to the business of America's pastime keeping up with the ever-changing, ever evolving world of technology. Shropshire points out that baseball was “a sport that was developed and became most successful in the era of radio.” He says in an era of watching sports on smartphones and other devices, baseball has been able to "maneuver its way around and continue to have a degree of success no matter what the medium is that people view it from.”
Case in point, Major League Baseball’s technology arm, MLB Advanced Media. Yes, it powers MLB.tv but MLB Advanced Media has evolved into a vendor for streaming TV over the web as well. It also powers the WWE Network, and it will power HBO’s new streaming video service which will launch later this year. The division is so successful, MLB is considering spinning it off according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
But while the technology for viewing is keeping up with the times, critics of the game itself say it is too slow-paced and too low-scoring. Shropshire says it's part of the charm. “The pace of baseball is what sets it apart from other professional sports and many fans appreciate that aspect of the game,” he says. “If you get latched on to baseball, if you begin to pay attention to baseball, that is part of what it is,” he says. “It is the pace of the game that really makes it unique from others. And there is something special about it.”
But there have been rumblings of change. A lawyer by trade, Rob Manfred was the Chief Operating Officer for the MLB from 2013 until taking over the commissioner role from Bud Selig in January. He is just the tenth Commissioner in Major League Baseball history and after just two months on the job, Manfred is already raising eyebrows.
Manfred has talked about ways to speed up games, and he briefly considered banning defensive shifts in an effort to give an offense an edge. (That idea was hit with backlash and Manfred has since backed off.) But in perhaps his most controversial move, Manfred recently said he will consider Cincinatti Reds great Pete Rose’s request for reinstatement in the game. Rose was banned from baseball for life for gambling on the game back in 1989. Then-commissioner Bartlett Giamatti handed down the ban. Rose and his representatives have asked the two commissioners who followed Giamatti—Fay Vincent and Bud Selig—to lift the ban. Neither obliged. Manfred is considering it.
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