Baseball Is Back! 5 Numbers That Prove It

No one likes to hear that a childhood obsession was foolish, even if the forced realization comes with truth. For some, it’s about religion. And for others—like me—it’s about, well, another kind of religion. We’ll call it baseball. From 2010-2022, it was trendy to declare the death of the national pastime. But five new data points paint a completely different reality—baseball is back!

(I’ll save the apology until the end.)

 

2:38

That’s 2 hours and 38 minutes, the average time it took to play a nine-inning game in 2024, down from a ludicrous 3 hours and 11 minutes in 2021. Fans wanted shorter games, and thanks to some key rules changes—a pitch clock being one of them—games haven’t been this short since 1981!

 

71,348,366

The total attendance for Major League Baseball (MLB) games in 2024, a 10 percent increase compared to 2022 and perhaps a sign that the record for single-season attendance (79 million in 2007) can be eclipsed.

 

$11.6 billion

An estimate of MLB’s revenue in 2023, its highest figure ever. While the number is not adjusted for inflation, it is second only to the NFL—which is surely not dying—among all sports leagues worldwide.

 

43.2

The average rating (in terms of television viewership) in Japan for the country’s seven games during the 2023 World Baseball Classic. To put that in perspective, the Super Bowl gets around that rating in the US. The point is that judging the health of a sport based solely on US viewership is reckless—also accounting for what’s going on in the world’s fourth-largest economy is not.

 

51%

The proportion of MLB television viewers under the age of 44, identical to viewership for the NFL. In other words, the narrative that baseball fans are old is officially false.

 

A Special Message to My Wife

During our seven-year courtship, you discovered I had problems.

Baseball, as you will remember, was one of them.

I couldn’t catch a ball—I’ve since passed that gene on to our children—but I thoroughly enjoyed watching other grown men do it.

Through it all, you had a feeling I would get better when I was older—remember our wedding song?

The near death of the sport helped bring your vision to fruition.

As such, I am so sorry to deliver the news that baseball is back.

Pero como dicen, el béisbol es otra cosa.

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