America’s favourite pastime in danger of being left in the past as Major League Baseball faces battle to stay relevant

The average fan is now 57 years old - far older than the average NFL and NBA fan

MLB needs to catch up with NFL and NBA (Getty)

When Major League Baseball kicks off its season on Thursday, it will begin its mission to save itself. Despite being known as ‘America’s pastime’, MLB has been lapped in popularity in the United States by the surging, ebullient NBA, and the NFL— the sport that used to be most famous for its spate of traumatic brain injuries until its national anthem feud with Donald Trump.

According to a study commissioned last year by Sports Business Journal, the average MLB fan is now 57 years old—up from 53 10 years earlier. The average NFL fan is age 50, while the average NBA fan is a breezy 42. Since Major League Baseball would like to continue collecting that golden advertising dollar from brands that market to 18 to 49-year-old customers (and it presumably has no interest in watching its core base go extinct in 20 years), Operation: Appeal To Young People begins post-haste.

The biggest, and most justified, complaint that attention challenged millennials have about baseball is that the games are too long. Despite subtle changes the league undertook last season to make the games move quicker—like encouraging batters to stay in the box during their at-bats and limiting the amount of time an instant replay could take. The average length of a nine-inning MLB game rose to an all-time high of three hours and five minutes in 2017, up from two hours and 51 minutes in 2004. And that’s 25 minutes longer than the average game played in the mid-1980s, when contests typically ran two hours and 40 minutes.

While 25 additional minutes might not seem like a long time to hardcore hardball fans, if you multiply that number by the 162 games every team plays each season, it comes out to 67 hours, or roughly three days of a person’s life. And it’s not as if these additional moments are action packed. Research has shown that most of this extra time is taken up by idle pitchers fiddling around on the mound while they settle on what type of pitch to throw next.

MLB's rules for the new season

1.     Catchers, teammates, and coaches can no longer walk to the mound to have strategic conversations or stall for an unlimited number of times in a game. The maximum number of mound visits per team per nine innings is now set at six per game. Should the game go into extra innings, each team will be allowed one visit for each additional inning.

2.     Because players complained they need the mound visits to counteract the opposing teams’ hitters from stealing their signs, the telephone lines between the clubhouse and the dugout will now be monitored by major league officials. And, presumably, if a team employee is caught relaying stolen information from the locker room to the dugout, that team will be penalised.

3.     A timer will count down from two minutes and five seconds from the end of one half-inning to the beginning of the next. A pitcher must begin to deliver his pitch when the clock strikes zero. If he has no justifiable reason for being delayed, the umpire can call a ball.

To combat this dawdling, Major League Baseball implemented a pitch clock in the minor leagues in 2015, which gives pitchers a more than reasonable 20 seconds to deliver a ball toward home plate. The commissioner wanted to introduce the pitch clock to the majors this season, but the players balked. So, in lieu of executing the most common sense solution, MLB was forced to enact a series of new rules.

MLB would like to reduce the average game time in 2018 by 10 minutes, down to two hours and 55 minutes. For 2019, the goal is to trim it to two hours and 50 minutes. Failure to hit those benchmarks might result in the league’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, unilaterally implementing the pitch clock for the 2020 season. Even though Manfred has that power right now, he is loath to make such a sweeping change without agreement from the players. And after the offseason it just endured, the players union is quite cranky.

While the league office seems to believe that pace of play is the biggest threat to baseball’s survival, the players argue that the quality of talent on the field—or lack thereof—is a far more urgent crisis. And they have a point. In 2017, MLB fielded three 100-game winners for the first time in 14 years. And though the Astros, Dodgers, and Indians were each exceptional teams in their own right, it’s hard to imagine all three cracking the century mark in wins if the current system didn’t also reward ball clubs for being as bad as possible. The way the league is set up right now, if a team is not in contention to win the World Series that year, its management is derelict in duty if it does not try to lose. The worse a team does, the better the draft picks it receives. Clubs that let their free agents walk pocket extra draft picks for their loss, while the teams that sign those pricey players forfeit theirs.

This system resulted in the most stagnant free-agent market ever this past offseason, which saw star pitchers such as Yu Darvish and Jake Arrieta remain team-less well into the New Year. Arrieta, the National League’s Cy Young Award winner in 2015, was signed so late that he won’t be ready to pitch until the second week of the season. Royals third baseman Mike Moustakas turned down a one year, $17.4m dollar offer to remain in Kansas City last November, figuring he’d get a better deal on the open market. A bidding war for his services never materialized, and he was forced to return to Kansas City on a $6.5m dollar deal in March.

As of the morning of opening day, recent all-stars Greg Holland and Jose Bautista didn’t have jobs at all.

Fixing player compensation will likely require changing the penalties for teams that are willing to shell out, and lessening the fines for rich ball clubs that field rosters that cost more than the sport’s suggested salary cap. But as warranted as their complaints may be, they’re having a hard time finding fans who feel sorry for men who get paid millions of dollars to play a children’s game for a living.