Braves ditching The Ted for suburbs

Or, perhaps, maybe the following sentence in the silent elephant that no one will talk about:

Braves fans from the northern suburbs don't want to drive home from downtown Atlanta at 10:30 pm at night.

I think the question wouldn't be whether the fans are commuting from work (downtown for many?). Baseball games last forever. If more of your fans - at 10:30 when they walk out to their cars - are within 20 minutes of home, they may be more likely to stay until the end of the game...and spend more money.

Kansas City has been in this pickle for 40 years with Royals/Kauffman Stadium. It's at the convergence of I-70/I-435. Access is relatively easy. Yet most of the disposable income is on the other side of the state line in Kansas - at least 20-25 minutes away. Paltry crowds fill the stadium on weeknights as the team has been lousy for decades.

This potential move by Atlanta is a hedge move. If the team goes downhill, at least they'll be closer to their ticket-buying customers. Baseball's demographics have also changed sharply. It's much older than 20 years ago. Outside of the MLB teams constantly on SportsCenter, it's a slowly dying business. If people in the urban core of America's cities don't want to go to baseball games, why not move to where the more engaged customers are?

 

You make good points about the travel time home, and about MLB's aging fan base. However, you're also risking -- by thinking of that way -- that your business is going to be in a long death spiral, with death by a thousand cuts. Sound familiar?

Then again, if Cobb County is giving $450 million or whatever for a new stadium, what does the current ownership care about what things look like in 20 years? Hell, by then they can find a sucker for a new stadium.

 

Not saying the Braves' ownership is taking a long-term look.

I work in "teevee". We are still doing extremely well in 2013 but, like baseball, our business is slowly dying. Viewers are older. Younger people not only don't watch. They mock what we do. We could take our profits from political ads for the next ten years but then wake up to a dead business in 2023. Instead, we're trying to find a way to "make it easier" for people to watch us. Mobile, on-demand, etc. The main point is making it easier for customers/viewers/users to watch us.

Maybe the Braves' ownership is looking at it like this. In 2013, they still have decent attendance but, once the season ticket holders are sipping Ensure in their nursing homes, who will fill the seats? Baseball has an extremely narrow demographic now unless you're in a market with a sizable population of people from Latino heritage. It's suburban white people who go to baseball games and these suburban white people are, increasingly, having fewer children and those fewer children would rather be playing Minecraft or texting instead of sitting through a 3.5-hour baseball game.

Heck, my son plays endless baseball games a year and he has no interest in going to a major league baseball game. He wants to see the NBA in person. More action.

That's the demo challenge for Old Man Selig.

 

In what parallel universe do you live where the baseball business is "slowly dying"?

The baseball business is booming beyond what any reasonable person could have comprehended even five years ago.

 

Yeah, I don't think baseball is dying either. Revenues, TV contracts, attendance, and team valuations are all up.

Live TV and events continue to draw advertisers.

 

That's what Gannett said as it was buying papers for top dollar as the Internet started taking hold.

I doubt MLB will be going anywhere, but exmediahack's point stands about baseball's aging demo. Like this recent WSJ story, "Why Kids Aren't Watching Baseball."

http://online.wSportsJournalists.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303843104579167812218839786

So many games dragging deep into their fourth hour. All those AARP-eligible folks lining the lower levels of the stands. Baseball has morphed into sports' version of the opera—long productions filled with pomp, color and crazy facial hair that younger audiences just don't get.

The average World Series viewer this year is 54.4 years old, according to Nielsen, the media research firm. The trend line is heading north: The average age was 49.9 in 2009. Kids age 6 to 17 represented just 4.3% of the average audience for the American and National League Championship Series this year, compared with 7.4% a decade ago.

Comparisons with the NFL are pointless. That behemoth of North American sports dominates nearly every demographic. But kids make up a larger segment of the television audiences for the NBA, NHL and even soccer's English Premier League than they do for baseball. ...

Yet participation rates also continue to decline, too, especially among casual players. Little League Baseball, which represents about two-thirds of the world's youth baseball, had 2.1 million players last year, compared with 2.6 million in 1997.

 

"Baseball's current growth thanks to TV and marketing revenue is a clear indicator that everything will continue to be rosy for the sport in 25 years," says the whistling man passing the graveyard.

I suppose the Millennial Generation is going to suddenly decide to buy baseball season tickets so they can relive with their kids the memories they never created with their own parents.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if baseball's revenues surpass football's in the next 10 years. Baseball has gone from $1.4 billion in 1995 to close to $8 billion this year. That doesn't include the minor leagues, which are thriving in smaller markets across the country.

Turns out, baseball is a content-producing machine with around 8,000 hours of live game programming every season (compared to maybe 1,000 hours for football) that can then be sliced, diced and repackaged for all platforms. Which is why RSN deals are growing at insane rates and driving the revenue increase.

 

If that happens, it's because the concussion issues has helped drive football down. Though I guess if you're including minor league revenue, it makes sense. The beauty of a lot of minor-league ball is that the price of admission is cheap enough, and the freedom of movement and amenities accessible enough, that you might bring your family to a game to kill time instead of the movies.

 

It won't have anything to do with the concussion issue.

The cable money is unbelievable. RSNs get the highest per-subscriber fee of any channel, more than ESPN even. That is baseball's gold mine.

 

I don't agree. I'm pretty sure the MLB's revenue trajectory was already steeper than the NFL's before the football concussion crisis. It's a function of RSNs and the internet providing endless new ways to package the content at a time when advertisers are clamoring for more DVR-proof content.

 

This is my point.

Talk about TV contracts for now. Sure, they're up. I'm still not exactly sure how many people actually watch Fox Sports Kansas City or Fox Sports Colorado to get their Royals or Rockies fix.

My major point here is this:

Baseball's demographics skew older and skew very white -- much like TV news itself so I'm rather aware of it.

Here is the bigger question for me. Where the hell are the games? A handful of ALCS/NLCS games are on FOX. The World Series is on FOX.

Yet, every week, I know where the NFL and college games are. CBS/FOX/NBC/ESPN for the shield. Everywhere else for my college fix.

On a Sunday morning, I'll flip through, thinking, "what NFL games are on today?"

In October, I'm thinking, "Oh. There's a baseball game on tonight?" Then I try and remember whether it's 245 or 247 on the DirecTV. Or is it on FOX? Or it is on ESPN?

Baseball feels like the current stock market. The financial numbers/stock prices look good in 2013 but are the fundamentals for the next 5-10 years strong? Can the stock market stay at 15,000 stay up as people stay unemployed or median incomes go down?

Can baseball keep on this pace with high salaries and high TV contracts... even as there is a "lost generation" of people under 30 who DO NOT WATCH and, in ten years, will not take their children to the games because, from 1990-2013, MLB took the easy TV money of 8 pm or 9 pm World Series games instead of taking less TV money at that point but growing the game?