How the relentless drive for optimization made baseball impossible to watch

Re:How the relentless drive for optimization made baseball i... by okwhateverdude on Saturday April 15, 2023 @06:41AM (#35579351)

That's a fair point. The changes they did make are definitely steering the large container ship with very slight course heading adjustments. But the cynic in me says that the audience is not the actual customer, the advertisers are. If they were to fundamentally change the sport in a way that would drive viewership up significantly, those extra advertising monies would easily paper over the loss from disgruntled audience.

The article makes a good point about misalignment here. Teams want to win (winning helps sell merch), but the league wants to sell ads (ads need worthwhile content). If these incentives were better aligned, maybe we'd end up with a less boring game that doesn't end up as background noise.

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Re:How the relentless drive for optimization made baseball i... by Waterluvian on Saturday April 15, 2023 @06:46AM (#35579382)

I agree. The business goal is to sell ads, tickets, hotdogs, and beer. I think they’re executing on profitability but in a cautious way. Too much sudden change can definitely kill a sport, like it can any product.

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Re:How the relentless drive for optimization made baseball i... by nobody9999 on Saturday April 15, 2023 @07:38AM (#35579692)

>I agree. The business goal is to sell ads, tickets, hotdogs, and beer. I think they’re executing on profitability but in a cautious way. Too much sudden change can definitely kill a sport, like it can any product.

That's a serious oversimplification of MLB teams' business models. Yes, ticket sales, marketing deals, food, beer and merchandise do make some money. However, the bulk of the money made by the teams (MLB is, as others have mentioned, a trade association which has been given special exemptions from anti-trust law) is from media deals with the major networks and "Regional Sports Networks" (RSN) which handle all the ads and broadcast details.

A few of the teams have their own RSNs, but most rely on third parties for that. In fact, one of the biggest (with rights to broadcast 14 of the 30 MLB teams) just went bankrupt.

For more information about that, and some really good "inside baseball" (see what I did there?) read this article[0] from The Athletic, published just yesterday.

[0] https://theathletic.com/4409306/2023/04/14/mlb-streaming-tv-...

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Re:How the relentless drive for optimization made baseball i... by Waterluvian on Saturday April 15, 2023 @08:05AM (#35579844)

Yeah vertical integration is a big part. Rogers owns the team, stadium, and TV network.

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