Is football really replacing baseball as our national pastime?

It’s that time of the year when the MLB season is just heating up and getting  . . .interesting to say the least and wham  -here comes football season.   For many decades, NFL training camps have coincided with the long summer months of baseball season but for fans, where does your real loyalty lie with  -football or baseball?

Is the NFL really our national sports “league” now?

If you look straight at the available marketing statistics, Major League Baseball has been losing its grip on the sports imagination of the American people for decades.  Arguably speaking, the average MLB fan is now 57 years old (I’m about to turn 54 so I guess I fit into that statistic.)  Well, the average age of an NFL fan is 51 years old, only six years younger.  In fact, the NBA and NHL have the lowest median age fans  at 42 and 49 years old, respectively.  If you look at it on the surface, baseball fans are in fact older and that’s because organized baseball has been around longer than any of the other sports.

Major League Baseball was already an established professional league when basketball was invented and the MLB was nearly 50 years old when the National Football League was founded in 1920.  Baseball is in our veins as Americans; I remember the old Chevy commercial that said “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet” was the summertime mantra of the American people.

So what has happened to baseball as our national pastime?  For starters, the NFL is much more streamlined and centralized than MLB could ever be.  Back in the 1960’s when professional football was truly growing into a major sport, the NFL negotiated with the major broadcasting networks to televise the NFL on a national level.  Sunday NFL game broadcasts are decided by the NFL and the ownership rights to these broadcasts are owned by the NFL head office.  With baseball, broadcasts are based on a regional level with individual teams having ownership stakes in the various local sports networks.  The NFL has a voice in which teams play on marquee broadcasts such as Sunday Night or Monday Night Football as well as the regular Sunday game broacasts.  If the NFL wants fans to see a game pitting Tom Brady against Patrick Mahomes or Aaron Rodgers, fans across the nation will get to see these games regardless of their location.

Baseball, on the other hand, still relies on an archaic system where only local or regional audiences will get to see a great matchup such as the Yankees playing the Cardinals or the Cubs.  As a direct result of the national broadcasting package developed by the NFL, even casual fans can see top football stars in action on a regular basis.  The only current national broadcasting system that baseball has is ESPN with their Sunday Night Baseball and occasional weeknight games.  Fox has developed a Saturday evening Baseball Night in America and this could be the seeds of a national, systematic broacasting plan to bring major games to homes across America on a more frequent basis.

Oher complaints against baseball is that it’s slow or boring for many casual fans to watch anymore.  With the advent of streaming services, viewers have nearly unlimited access to watch what they want and more frequently younger Americans are more interested into binge watching TikTok videos or texting than they are watching a low scoring baseball game.  Here is another fun fact:  the average time of an NFL game broadcast is three hours, twelve minutes while the average MLB game clocks in at three hours, five minutes.  

Baseball is actually a faster game while being broadcasted than football.  In fact, the NFL now slots a 3.5 hour window for their Sunday games.  Football has far more breaks in action than baseball and the NFL is far more profitable than MLB with all of those commercial breaks built in to television broadcasts.  In turn, NFL teams receive more revenue sharing income than MLB teams.

The biggest hurdle that baseball is fighting is the attention span of millenials and Gen Z viewers who are far more used to “multi-tasking” e.g. watching multiple things simultaneously while still trying to watch a sporting event.  In my next article, I’ll discus ways that baseball can market itself in better ways to help it complete with the NFL juggernaut.  Mind you, I don’t think that baseball will truly ever remain America’s national pastime but it can improve its viewability and win over fans-again.