Bill Shaikin discusses Rob Manfred’s success story, bringing a new generation into a love of the game.

A generation that was supposed to have dismissed baseball as irreparably slow and boring and was supposed to have been lost to esports and screens of all sorts has found its way back to baseball.

Half of MLB’s television viewers last year were younger than 44, according to Playfly Insights. The median age of an MLB ticket buyer has fallen from 51 in 2019 to 45 today, according to the league.

In that time, the average age of a new fan engaging with the league’s data base — by buying a ticket or a player jersey, for instance, or setting up a streaming account — has dropped from 43 to 36.

Baseball isn’t dying, but it could have been. Its revival required a game plan.

MSN.com

Fans in general don’t like Manfred, and much of that comes from often presenting himself poorly in public. Many feel the commissioner should be looking out for the fans, and often Manfred does not express that aspect of his job. I hope I’m still here in 2050 to see the judgement of history on him, and I suspect he might go down as baseball most effective commissioner.

Once more fascinating item from the article:

Nonetheless, he agrees the work of cultivating and maintaining a younger audience is far from done. On the field, the league’s focus is in finding ways to cut down on strikeouts — pitching to contact reduces the time of an at-bat; more balls in play means more action, and more flashes of the athleticism that lights up social media.

“That’s the way baseball was originally conceived: the hitter versus the defense, not the hitter versus the pitcher,” Sword said.

That’s really tough to do. Hitters and pitchers keep getting stronger. Here’s a radical idea: ban the fastball and require hitters to swing a bat 36 ounces as a minimum. Any pitch over 92 MPH is a ball if taken. I know the physics show that the weight of the bat doesn’t matter that much, but a combination of slower pitches and slower bats should mean fewer home runs, but more balls in play. MLB would probably want to bring this down slowly so as not to render a generation of pitchers ineffective. Manfred does like to use the minors to run multiple tests of changes, so if something like this was brought to the majors, it would have some level of success in professional baseball.