is features writer with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.
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How it started
“KING BASEBALL, monarch of the American sport world, is sick,” a New York Times story on the disappearance of amateur and small town sandlots begins. Hundreds of thousands of fans attended the opening games of the season, and star players are making bank in huge stadiums. “Nevertheless the critics say that his Royal Highness is indisposed.”
The story is from 1925. But it reads like it could have been published a hundred years later.
“Baseball is dying” is a perennial claim that feels like (literally) old news — but by the numbers there’s truth to it. World Series viewership is far from its peak decades ago. Attendance at ballparks hasn’t yet matched 2007 numbers. Even with viewership and attendance on the upswing, baseball is dwarfed by football, both in sheer audience numbers and in the American imagination. A few years ago, recognizing that games were dragging on and on to their detriment, MLB implemented a pitch clock to speed things up; this season, the league will have an automated system calling balls and strikes, dubbed “robot umps,” at home plate when a player challenges the human umpire’s call.
But MLB is going into the 2026 season with real momentum — the 2025 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays was a certified hit. The final game of the series was the most-watched World Series game in eight years in the US, and it broke international viewership records. The enthusiasm spilled into social media: Bluesky later reported that on the day of Game 7, at least 3 percent of all posts on the platform were about baseball. TikTok and MLB jointly have said that baseball is “one of the fastest-growing sports communities” on the platform. The league said that its own social media accounts across platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram had record views and engagement during the series.
Even with a pitch clock and automated ball and strike challenges, baseball is a slow, routine game. Teams play every day, and there’s no big event with a Bad Bunny performance to bookend the season. Some have complained that MLB is bad at marketing its stars, failing to make them into household names (when MLB rolled out a program providing players with social content in 2019, even some players said it felt late).
Can MLB turn the hard-won attention into something sustainable?
How it’s going
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