Baseball remains in trouble with the general public, though, despite the ticket prices people pay and the flocks who keep showing up to pay them. An ESPN poll revealed that among kids, the next generation of fans, football is number one, basketball is number two, and baseball is number three in popularity, with only 18 percent expressing the opinion that the national pastime is their favorite game. With owners looking to max revenues now instead of build for the long term, they started nationally telecast playoff games, their most critical television product, at increasingly late hours, alienating the fans of the future who couldn’t stay up to watch the conclusions, let alone the fans of the past and present who didn’t want to stay up, either. Will maxing out ad revenues now backfire in later in eroded fan support? Probably, if it hasn’t already. Will it erode sponsor support, pegged at as much as $9 million per team per year? Maybe, if the sport no longer serves as the conduit for the corporation to reach the consumer …
So, increasingly, the corporation becomes and maintains itself as the conduit for the fan to get to the game and get closer to the game, however that may be.
Excerpted from Sports Marketing by Howard Schlossberg. Published by Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts, 1996.