Fanalytics Podcast: The Future of Major League Baseball - Key Players and Troubling Trends In this episode of the Fanalytics podcast, Mike Lewis from Emory University dives deep into the state of Major League Baseball. Baseball's unique cultural significance, its strategic nature, and the nostalgia it evokes are all discussed, alongside the challenges the sport faces in contemporary American fandom. Mike highlights three key players - Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Paul Skenes - and the Chicago White Sox as critical figures for the 2024 season. Despite remarkable individual performances, MLB struggles with low viewership and media attention compared to other sports, as demonstrated through Google Trends analysis. Additionally, the episode explores the economic dynamics and brand strategies influencing the sport, including the potential move of the White Sox to the suburbs.
00:00 Introduction to the Fanalytics Podcast
00:08 The Cultural Significance of Baseball
02:55 Current State of Major League Baseball
04:28 Key Players to Watch in 2024
04:58 Aaron Judge: The New York Yankee Star
08:20 Shohei Otani: The Japanese Unicorn
10:54 Paul Skenes: The Rising Star
14:25 Analyzing Media Attention and Trends
19:12 The Chicago White Sox: A Case Study in Futility
24:21 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
The Google Trends data is at fandomanalytics.com
Get the Fanalytics book at https://www.amazon.com/Fandom-Analytics-Creating-Harnessing-Consumer/dp/3031659244
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Fanalytics podcast. I'm Mike Lewis from Emory university. Okay today. I want to talk about major league baseball now, baseball. Is not one of the topics we discuss a lot on the show. But baseball is baseball is a sport that I actually think a lot about, uh, by the way, I've got a book out and this is related to baseball. Called fandom analytics and I'm working on a new book called future fandom. Baseball plays a significant role in both of those.
Because when I think about sports, when I think about fandom, I inevitably come back to baseball when I'm thinking of a long-term perspective, short term, you know, absolutely go to the NFL hell in a 2020 for short term. And it's been thinking more about the WWE NBA than major league baseball. But when I'm thinking long-term about American culture and American fandom, Baseball is the sport.
I, I, my mind always goes back to. Now I should say this. When I think about baseball, I think about it on a personal level. I don't watch a lot of baseball. I've never really enjoyed watching my enjoyed too strong, but I've never had the same. Enthusiasm for watching baseball as a, or at least growing up, watching baseball as I did for things like basketball and football. But. But as you get a little bit older, I think he come back to baseball. That there's something about the game.
There's a beauty in the game of baseball. That isn't present in the other sports, right. So absolutely. The NFL. Is, you know, you'll often hear compared to like a military conquest strategy, two teams. Incredibly violent militaristic, right? Grand jury spectacle. And the NFL definitely has that. Basketball is almost more of a pop culture sport at this point. The the high flying athletes. The slam dunks from Michael Jordan all the way through, through present day, this spectacular athleticism. So each sport has something distinctive about it. Baseball's more slow moving. More strategic. More based on the numbers. Um, and it also occurs. You know, by and large, you know, baseball inside is probably an absolute sin to the purists. Occurs outside beautiful day, beautiful weather in the summer. Um, I think maybe it's a little tarnished at this point with the amount of neon and, you know, tool races or sausage races, some of the entertainment that happens within the stadium. Sort of pushing things more towards an entertainment. Aspect rather than a pure sports aspect. Okay.
So all that being said, 2024. I tend to, I almost look at baseball with a little bit of, with a little bit of worry. So last year baseball had some of its lowest world series ratings of all time. When you start to really boil it down, you. You know, you might be looking at. Uh, world series. If we don't have marquee teams in it, That's going to draw. An average of let's say seven, eight, 9 million. Viewers and contrast, of course, Superbowl's going to draw a hundred, 110, 120 million. Viewer's so baseball.
Now, if you go back to the 1970s,
You almost saw fairly comparable numbers for major league baseball, world series seven games versus the weekend matchup of a Superbowl. So there's clearly been a shift over time. America's pastime has really become America's second. And maybe America's third sport. So when I look at 2024, I look at it almost as doing a temperature check, looking for, looking for points of life or symptoms of, of problems.
Oh, you know, what is the health of this league going to be going forward?
Alright, I'm recording this on, uh, September, what is it, September 22nd. So the Major League Baseball season has about a week to go. But in terms of thinking about the key moments of the season. So, look, I'm leaving out the postseason. Could be some dramatic events. But when I think about baseball in 2024, I end up really focused on three players, and one team.
Those three players are Shohei Otani, Aaron Judge, Paul Skeens, and the team is the Chicago White Sox. So today's episode is really just thinking about those three players, that team, and what these, what these individuals and this club means for the future of baseball going on.
So of those names, the one I want to start with is Aaron Judge. Now Judge is, Judge especially was introduced to America a couple of years ago when he was on a home run quest, I think for the AL record. It was really notable and kind of a wake up call to a lot of people because what they would do is they would interrupt college football games, right?
So you could be watching Auburn play Tennessee, right? And suddenly the TV camera is going away and we're going to a New York Yankee. on a home run quest. I think at that time he was trying to break the American League home run record. And there were legitimate complaints, right? So this is, this is kind of unprecedented, right?
We think, we think baseball, and again, I think we all know better that football is America's game, but historically baseball is America's game. The Yankees are the most lauded team of all time, the most World Series, the most Hall of Famers, a lot, you know, truly some of the icons of American, not just baseball.
But of sports. And so Aaron Judge this year has 55 home runs as of this taping, maybe I'll get a couple more. So you're talking about 57 home runs again. He is on a pay pace to be one of the all time great home run hitters. And, and he's doing it in New York City's New York City wearing the pinstripes.
He's got 138 rbis. He's batting 3 23. So this is a guy, he's, so, he's third, he's leading the league in home runs. And in rbis he's third and batting average. So to put the, you know, again, I don't even want to lay, you know, try and put this in perspective. It's a New York Yankee on a first place team hitting more than 50 home runs.
that is on essentially the edge of being a triple crown winner. Right? This is, this is prime fodder for America, for the American sports fans. This is legendary. In past generations, this is truly legendary stuff. This is being on the cover of Time Magazine and Sports Illustrated. But again, like I said, this is, this is a different time.
Is there Time Magazine? Maybe at the airport. Is there Sports Illustrated? I don't know if there's still a print edition. Right, so this is a guy who is putting up numbers that will put him amongst names like Mantle and Maris, DiMaggio, but getting very little attention. So when I look at baseball, I think, Wow, things have really come up essentially perfect.
If you're the marketer and you're writing the script for MLB, you want to have the biggest star in the game playing for New York City. Right? Playing for the New York Yankees. Uh, in terms of World Series odds, because I think this is an important part of the story as well, the Yankees are one of the top three teams.
A little bit of betting odds there after the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. He's on a winning team. With amazing, amazing results. Now Aaron Judge, like I said, this should be cover of Sports Illustrated kind of guy. Sort of the American, American hero. Now what makes it even a little bit more special, is on the other coast, we got a guy named Shohei Otani.
And he is a true unicorn of a player. He is, you know, he set a new standard for a combination of, you know, stealing 50 bases and also hitting over 50 home runs. He's probably on pace to hit about 55 for the season. Incidentally, he also has 123 RBIs. So we're in the scenario where you got one superstar in New York City.
Another superstar in Los Angeles. One's American, one's Japanese, one is nearly about to, nearly competing to win a triple crown. The other is creating whole new comparisons, right? The 50 50 club. And by the way, the Japanese guy, he's also a pitcher who's recovering from surgery this year. So you've got the kind of players That would be true cultural icons.
Guys that would be on the late night shows. Guys that would be on the covers of the magazines. Guys that would be known to every third grader across America. You truly have that level of generational, generational performances going on. I mean, look, we've got a moment, one guy has 55 home runs, one has 53.
That's pretty close to a home run chase. It's almost like two guys battling out for 60 home runs. I mean, as a side note in all this, one of the, one of the things that I think baseball has truly damaged itself with was the steroid era. And again, I'm not gonna I don't know, maybe the steroid era is still going on in different form, but the, you know, Maguire hitting 70 home runs, Bonds eclipsing that mark, have really reduced baseball's ability to do something special, to set new records.
I think it's, it's an overlooked part of what baseball's dilemma is, is that you've got these, these marks that are maybe ludicrous in a non PED era, but again. Baseball really has something, you know, should have been set up for something amazing. One superstar in New York, the other superstar in LA, the teams maybe on a collision course, the guys competing to see who can get to almost 60 home runs, the two teams on a collision course for the World Series.
This is something that, again, if you're a baseball reporter or a dream type scenarios.
Okay, the third player I want to mention is Paul Skeens. So a rookie for the Pittsburgh Pirates, came out of college for, for the LSU Tigers. Now Skeens has been, you know, for a rookie pitcher, he's been, he's been pretty dominant. Uh, he's 11 3, 1. 99 ERA, now he came up midway through the year, so he's, he actually doesn't, um, Have enough innings to qualify for some of the stats published on either you go to ESPN, you're not gonna see 'em in the ERA leaders, 'cause he doesn't have enough innings.
He's got 167 strikeouts and 131 innings. Now that translates to a number of 11.4 strikeouts per nine innings., I don't want to overestimate the impact of, of, of schemes, but he's been, he belongs in the story.
I mentioned he's out at LSU, and so one of the things about him is that his girlfriend. is more famous than he is. So his girlfriend is Livi Dunn from Instagram, TikTok. You know, she's got 8. 1 million followers on TikTok. She is in every list of the top paid athletes for NIL. , so she's made a lot of money, and she's legitimately famous when he went to Pittsburgh she went with him So it's um you know we could almost imagine them sort of a power couples in sports where you've got you know obviously you know Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Paul Skeens and Livi Dunn are probably part of that you know they're probably in the top five of that kind of a list so if He's been, and look, the other thing in, sometimes this stuff seems a little frivolous.
But he's got a mustache that will make him the star of any Sports Center episode where he has a, where he has an outstanding performance because these guys love to look at him. So he's got a great look, got a great girlfriend, got a dominating fastball. He's winning as a rookie. So he's the kind of guy that is clearly that.
Next generation of MLB star, now he's doing and look, he's doing it in Pittsburgh, so you know, we've got, we've got a Japanese guy in Los Angeles, we got Aaron Judge in New York, we also have some really interesting young talent with a glamorous, you know, like it's not Hollywood anymore, with a glamorous Instagram, www.
fandomanalytics. com, Kawhii Leonard, Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic, Professors. fm, Caitlin Clark, Doug Battle, Doug Battle, www. fandomanalytics. com, Voskano. com, Kathy Kovacs, Emmy Wehr, And I'll say potential narratives. Somehow these stories have not really gotten out into the mainstream. These guys are, look, if you're listening to this podcast, you know who Aaron Judge is, you know who Shohei Ohtani is, you know who Paul Skeens is.
But when we go into the general, we go into sort of a more of the general world, these guys might be relatively unknown figures.
📍 All right, so we got three guys, Shohei Otani, Aaron Judge, and Paul Skeens. Great potential stories. So the next thing I've done, and look, you guys can find this content on the www. fandomanalytics. com page. So again, that's fandomanalytics. com. So what I've done next is I've gone to something called Google Trends, which is a tool for tracking Essentially how much interest there is about a celebrity, or an institution, or a product, or whatever you're interested in.
Now Google Trends doesn't give you the, the web traffic. What Google Trends gives you is the relative traffic for the group of people, or celebrities, or again, whatever you select. So what I've done is I've selected five names. I've got Aaron Judge. Shohei Otani, Paul Skeens, and then as points of comparison, I added Caitlin Clark from the WNBA and Bronnie James from the Los Angeles Lakers.
So the thought here is that these three guys Major baseball figures, and again, especially o and judge versus look, um, Caitlyn Clark is clearly a media and sports star, but if you look at something like attendance for the WNBA versus major league baseball, major League baseball absolutely dwarfs the WNBA in every city.
You know, you're probably talking about 35,000 versus maybe a questionable 8,000 for A-W-N-B-A game. Now, women's basketball has broken through largely in some of the, sort of the TV and the media markets, um, so she's gotten a lot of attention. Now, Bronnie James was a big time NIL athlete. Obviously, we all know Bronnie James is LeBron James son, drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers.
Um, he tends to get a lot of attention on the internet, uh, you know, and especially, you know, going out for the draft average, Coming out for the NBA draft after averaging, I think it was less than three points per game at USC. So the chart I'm going to put on fandomanalytics. com shows the relative search volume for these five names over the last year.
It's a troubling story for Major League Baseball. Okay, so The, like, the, the, the most attention paid to any of these athletes was Kaitlyn Clark in the, uh, in the timeframe, right around the, uh, the women's NCAA championship, the March Madness and the WNBA draft. You know, look, I, this is on a daily basis or weekly basis, so the numbers are, are jumping all around.
But in general, the Caitlin Clark search and Bronny James search, especially around the time of the NBA draft and him choosing to enter the NBA draft, they tend to have more attention, more search than any of those three names. Now, the only time that the baseball players actually break through, there's really two moments.
When Shohei Otani signed a, again, such a puzzling world of sports. When Otani Signed a 700 million dollar 10 year deal at the end of 2023. And again, when Otani got a bunch of hype and attention for setting this new standard of being the first member of the 50 home run 50 stolen base club. But if you look at this chart, and look Paul Schemes, rookie, great story.
Really has not, uh, not made it to national attention. It really is kind of stunning though that a New York Yankee slugger on a first place team potentially trac chasing a triple crown tends to is, is fallen behind the son of an NBA great and A-W-N-B-A player
okay, so, Baseball 2024, great stories, great narratives, New York, Los Angeles. Japanese superstar, American homegrown star, a new pitcher with a celebrity TikTok, modern, social media, star, girlfriend, with a great mustache, lighting up hitters with strikeouts in Pittsburgh. Great, great stories. But the problem, the distressing thing for baseball, is that these narratives aren't breaking through.
I look at the, you know, Google activity, the Google trends, and Shohei Otani sometimes breaks through, but less interest in Aaron Judge and Paul Skeen than in, um, you know, Caitlin Clark and Barney James. Great stories, but really these great stories are more of a warning sign. Now on the other side, my favorite story from as a sports marketing person, as a sports business professor.
is the Chicago White Sox. So the White Sox, the White Sox are having a, they're having a crazy season. They have there, there's some, there's a video on Twitter of a where the, the claim is made that for a double header, they had 98 people in the stands. And so the White Sox are looking to set a new modern record for the most defeats. When I'm taping this, there's 36 in 120.
The 1962 Mets lost 120 games. The Tigers lost 119, so the White Sox are on pace to lose 125. or 124 games. I mean, this is really. I mean, this is a level of, this is a level of losing that we just don't see in Major League Baseball. Now, when you look at the payrolls, right, we've seen a lot of tanking over the last few years, right, this is this idea that you cut the payroll, you build up the farm system and you compete for a while, then essentially, usually it's a small market team, then you let the players go and you start over.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Uh, Crosstown Cubs are seventh in payroll. Mets are first in payroll, 316 million Cubs seventh at 230 million . White Sox are, have a payroll of 134 million, which puts 'em in 18th. Oakland is 30th at 62 million. Now Oakland is obviously pulling things down for the move to Vegas, but the White Sox have a decent sized payroll.
Um. And so, looking at what's going on with the White Sox, this is, like I said, this is really an amazing story, an unprecedented level of losing in the modern era. So what does this really mean? And this is where I tend to think baseball's, baseball's in a strange place. The White Sox don't have a great history, right?
So if you're from Chicago, Cubs are clearly Chicago's team, the White Sox are the second team. Has to do with the location of the ballparks. has to do with the, the, you know, the, the Cubs being on WGN.
So when we think about the Sox, you know, it's never been a great brand, right? Um, they, you know, located on the South side, I think a lot of their natural constituency has, has moved out. The area has become less, less Irish, less Catholics, less, uh, less essentially core baseball fans. So the thing about the White Sox, why I think it's such a fascinating story.
is that it doesn't, this level of losing probably doesn't matter this much. I've seen reports that the team, that Jerry Rendsdorf bought the team for about 2 million, and now it's worth over 2 billion. I don't think having a season like this actually costs him any, any value. He's still able to sell this to, you know, whoever the next billionaire is.
I've heard some speculation he might, wants to sell to the Saudis. Um, that, this is something that can be instantly. Fixed, right? So again, got these great stories going on, don't seem to be breaking through the media clutter. White Sox having a disastrous season doesn't seem to affect the long term value of the club.
Uh, you know, and in particular, the solution for the White Sox, I don't think this is anything, you know, earth shattering, is to move to the suburbs. Uh, I live in Atlanta at the moment, Marietta, and the, the, the Braves essentially moved to where the fans were, and it's been a rousing success. And so for the White Sox.
Moving out to some place like Naperville, building a mixed use development with entertainment options, um, a lot of retail, restaurants, is one of the easiest business decisions that could ever be made. Moving to where the baseball fans are, the western suburbs, I chose Naperville, you could also imagine moving toward the northwestern suburbs, moving to where baseball fans live, is the easiest win of all time.
So, it's I mean, there's interesting sides to this story, like, you know, for example, tanking is the new norm in all of sports. Being a losing team doesn't seem to really do much to degrade brand equity. As long as you figure out a way to win again in the future, fans seem to keep coming back. It's a good question of how much futility do you need to really break the brand equity.
The other thing, since this is Chicago, Does having two teams in a market ever really work? You know, you think there's always a clear number one if it's in the NFL, the New York Giants over the New York Jets, uh, the New York Knicks over the Nets, it's the Lakers over the Clippers, it's the Cubs over the Sox.
So, if you're the White Sox, you've gotta do something dramatic. You know, you either gotta go out there and you gotta win a bunch of World Series, and the Sox have won two World Series since Turn of the century, 1959 and 2005, or you gotta move to Naperville. And I think that's a great way to put it. That the key to sport success at this point is probably moving to Naperville.
is more important than winning a World Series or two. Okay, so that's where I'm at in terms of the 2024 Major League Baseball season. Great narratives, but some strange economics and some strange incentives for owners. Uh, to see the Google Trends chart, you can find them at, at, uh, fandomanalytics. com. Uh, that's this week's podcast.
Thanks guys