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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Is that the right move though? We can make any event exciting. Implementation is rarely the hard part. (funny how closely this parallels a chat I had with one of my engineers this week)

I like Baseball because it’s relaxed and it’s on for 3 hours and I can have it in the background, looking over on occasion whenever I hear something exciting. If I wanted a sport of non-stop action that demands my full attention, I’d watch hockey.

MLB is walking a tightrope right now of evolving to be better at what it wants to be, and to keep people engaged (it’s a business after all), but not to transform into something entirely different. The customers likely wouldn’t be happy if they all got what they wanted.

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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.

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.

>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-...

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

> it’s a business after all

is it? I thought those sports organisations are not businesses but associations of the clubs. Is it different in the US?

The article is basically about professional baseball, which by definition is a business. I don’t think non-professional leagues have this problem.

They’re trade associations which effectively represent the interests of the teams/clubs which constitute them.

Agree , good post

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