Book review: Mitchell, L. (2016). Will Big League Baseball Survive?: Globalization, the End of Television, Youth Sports, and the Future of Major League Baseball.

Mitchell, L. (2016). Will Big League Baseball Survive?: Globalization, the End of Television, Youth Sports, and the Future of Major League Baseball. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

If you ever wondered what political consultants get paid for, Will Big League Baseball Survive? might prove enlightening, not so much for what it says about baseball, but for how the author applies his research and analytical skills to sport.  Mitchell Lincoln is an American consultant and political analyst with a PhD from Columbia University.  He has been published widely in US mainstream media and has written three books on politics and democracy in the former Soviet Union and East Bloc countries.

His baseball book is something like a SWOT analysis, an acronym business students will recognize as a commonly used interpretive device: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.  SWOT offers a business a snapshot of current operations in terms of what it already does well, where it is failing, how it might improve, and who or what it needs to worry about. Mitchell doesn’t structure his book in quite this way, but the concept (or something like it) is implicit in the discussion.

Attentive readers may also observe how analysts, consultants, and academics fill out their work to justify their fees or salaries.  There is quite a lot of repetition of themes, as well as padding the text with overly long introductions consisting of baseball anecdotes used to illustrate a chapter theme that have little bearing on the subsequent discussion.  Each anecdote does, though, add several paragraphs, often pages, to a book that could be easily presented as a long essay.

In short, Mitchell makes no major predictions nor offers any magic charms.  What he does well is remind the reader that what we take for granted hasn’t always been so, in fact is only recently so, and might just as quickly not be so in the very near future. Until the mid-20th century, professional baseball was played exclusively by white men in the northeast and midwest United States.  Parallel leagues based on race and geography competed for the attention of baseball enthusiasts, while the National and American leagues were separate legal entities managed independent of each other.  The most common way to consume baseball, if you didn’t live near a stadium and couldn’t attend a game, was to listen to a radio broadcast or read about it in a newspaper. Television broadcasts were infrequent. Most games were poorly attended, the average salary of a baseball player was perhaps five times higher than the average salary of an American worker (as opposed to 50 to 100 times higher today), the media conspired to lionize players while hiding their dirty laundry, and football, basketball, and other ball games were niche sports.

Imagine if none of this had changed. Baseball survived, and thrived, because those in the business of baseball imagined the potential profit in adaptation.  With the possible exception of integration, none of these changes turned on ethics.  Television, for example, is not morally superior to radio, but it turned out to generate far greater revenue, especially with the emergence of cable technology in the 1980s.

Mitchell spins out five possible scenarios for the future of Major League Baseball, a chapter that is much less informative than it might seem. Predictions need to be as general as possible to have any plausibility, but in the absence of specifics what’s left are simple-minded observations that any baseball podcaster might come up with, like a general economic collapse resulting in declining ticket sales. 

Perhaps of more interest is what Mitchell identifies as possible threats or challenges.  How those play out will probably be different than anyone can predict, but it is still possible to identify trends.  One of these is declining television ratings and stadium attendance.  Mitchell notes that while ticket sales have not declined precipitously, it appears that many tickets go unused, which could be a worrying sign of public disinterest. Televison ratings in local markets have been strong in recent years (only a few teams have benefited from the increase), but national viewing trends have seen a steady decline.   Much of this has to with the increase of entertainment options and how entertainment is consumed. (The NFL has also experienced a decline in viewership recent years.) Current MLB revenue depends heavily on cable contracts set to expire in 2021.  As more American viewers move from cable to streaming and à la carte video options, will MLB be able to find ways to replace the roughly $1.5 billion annual revenue currently derived from sale of cable rights?

Even if it should, there is concern that MLB will begin to see a terminal decline in its core market. Of the four major US sports, baseball has the oldest fan base with the fewest number of young fans. Connected to this decline in youth interest, and possibly feeding into future declines, are changes in American youth sport, which has experienced greater degrees of specialization requiring substantial investments in time and money.  Children with casual or social interest in playing baseball are typically left with fewer options and perhaps less motivation.  The result overall has been a steep decline in the number of American youth playing baseball. Of concern to MLB is that as fewer children engage in baseball, there will be fewer adult fans.

So, where does all this lead?  Mitchell sees potential in exploiting core fans for greater revenue.  An aging fan base has the great advantage of having larger amounts of disposable income, and many of those older fans are willing to spend on their hobby.  The challenge will be in finding ways to monetize products and services for this audience.  Another way to balance the decline in US audiences is building up audiences in other countries. Thus far the international market has served the MLB largely as a cheap labor pool, but there is potential in moving MLB play into countries with established fan bases.

Anyone reading widely on baseball has seen discussion of these issues in various media outlets.  The links in the paragraphs above lead to articles from dedicated baseball sources as well as mainstream news channels. Nothing Mitchell identifies in this book is particularly newsworthy, but as a book it is a (mostly) succinct presentation of the major ideas, handy for those new to the subject or for those needing all the ideas bundled together in one place.  The writing is sharp and flows well.  A couple of tables are included, as well as footnotes with links (in the electronic version) to internet-based sources; no index is included.

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