Major League Baseball proves it's best in class when it comes to all-star content
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The biggest bull market this week has been Major League Baseball, which consolidated its position as best in class when it comes to its all-star game offering in particular and all-star week content in general.
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It's typically been the best and most enduring all-star package among the five major North American men's professional sports leagues, long after it relinquished its place as 'America's Pastime' — the most popular sport in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Part of that has been that it approximates the real thing more closely than any of the other all-star applications. Another part especially this year — has quite paradoxically been its use of the all-star game as a testing ground for new rules and technology.
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Make no mistake, the curiosity around automatic balls and strikes helped draw a solid 7.2 million in average national audience in the U.S. Ditto for the first-ever 'swing off' that allowed Kyle Schwarber to steal the show with three home runs in as many swings as the tiebreaker to a roller-coaster 6-6 nine-inning game between the National League and American League in Atlanta.
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Those U.S. TV numbers eclipse those for the NBA all-star game and NFL Pro Bowl, both of which hovered in the range of 4.7 million this year. Yet even the MLB all-star game couldn't match, let alone exceed, the audiences for the final of the Four Nations Face-Off, the tournament that essentially replaced the NHL all-star game six months ago and drew approximately 16 million viewers in Canada (6.3 million) and the U.S. (9.3 million).
Above and beyond TV and radio, baseball's all-star week carried very strong fan engagement numbers on social, especially with the home run derby Monday and the game itself Tuesday setting the stage for two days of no regular season baseball on Wednesday and Thursday. That facilitated significant follow up analysis and discussion on sport television, radio and digital, with the swing off, new rules and odes to Babe Ruth's #3 and Hank Aaron's #44 benefiting from significant afterglow and air time right into the weekend.
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Bears-of-the-Week
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The National Football League is known as the Shield for a reason. It is sheer Teflon as the biggest juggernaut in the business of sport, especially in the U.S. You can already feel the build up to the pre-season ramping up. One would think that financial strength would reflect positively for both ownership and the players and, to an extent, it does. Yet it sure seems like the NFL Players Association is the weakest of the players unions in North America. It looked that way on Friday when NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell Jr., announced his resignation after two years of missteps and general disorder.
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In the meantime, baseball — which still has the most powerful union in professional sport and no salary cap — has most of the stage to itself for the rest of July and the month of August. It's 13 days away from the MLB trade deadline and the final stretch run to the 162-game regular season, one that ideally creates a high-water mark of pennant races and wild card chases in September. Make no mistake that the MLBPA won't be diminishing its place in pro sport labour any time soon, especially with signs of growth and heightened player recognition in this era of Shohei Ohtani.
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