Depending on which side of the aisle your team sits on, torpedo bats are either the best thing to happen to baseball this season or an illegal advantage masterminded by the most villainous organization in all of sports: the Yankees, of course, whose nine home runs on Opening Day against the Milwaukee Brewers led to several other teams rushing out to equip their clubhouses with the new lumber. If you’re MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, however, torpedo bats are a net positive—the latest micro-innovation, after the pitch-clock, to add enthusiasm around a game that has fallen behind its peers in media hype and deal size. In a recent sit-down with the Times, Manfred said that the bats provided entertainment, and that robust public discussion about the equipment was a proxy for the league’s relevance. Left unsaid, of course, was a larger point: Torpedo bats drive more attention, which enhances fandom, all of which creates leverage at the negotiation table. One presumes this is on Manfred’s mind amid the final year of his $550 million agreement with ESPN, as he tests out new potential streaming partners and prepares for a significant set of negotiations in ’28 as Fox’s and WBD’s deals expire. In many ways, Major League Baseball’s current predicament is misunderstood. While ESPN might have felt that its rights package was not worth the half-billion dollars it was paying, the game has rarely been more popular with audiences aged 18 to 35—the result of Manfred and Theo Epstein’s rules changes, and the cadre of historical talents in the game today. For example, last year’s Dodgers-Yankees World Series drove 136 percent more TikTok engagement for the MLB account than the 2023 World Series, with a 36 percent increase in views, to 72 million. MLB has grown faster on TikTok than on sites that skew older, like X, where it took twice as long to amass roughly the same number of followers. Since 2019, the number of ticket buyers aged 18 to 35 has increased 8.5 percent, and that cohort’s viewership for national baseball games has seen double-digit increases. Social growth, of course, can’t make up for lost cable revenue. And, alas, sometimes covering sports media can feel like beating the same drum a little bit louder every day: We know that local revenue is vital to all franchises but existential to smaller-market clubs. For most teams, roughly a quarter of their finances come from those deals, and yet R.S.N.s are a fire that can’t be put out. In his Times interview, Manfred literally used that word—existential—to encapsulate the challenges of his small-market clubs. But at least their challenges frame his mandate: If fandom is growing while local media revenue is disintegrating, how can you offset those losses? It’s time to get creative…

Now that we’ve accumulated enough time, data, and knowledge to look back at the start of the streaming revolution, we can see what worked and what didn’t. Relying on owned and operated programming, despite the logic of vertical integration, did not provide the necessary scale. Neither did reliance on pure-play ad-free growth alone. What worked was a combination of bundling, differentiated pricing for more cost-sensitive homes, and sports. And, crucially, streaming sports strategies are predicated on leagues and superstars, not teams. According to a Disney study, Gen Z is only half as likely as their Gen X parents to root for their home team. Baseball executives recognize that, within our increasingly nationalized sports environment, their league remains the most local of the major sports leagues—a relic of their franchise-based, non-rev-share model, and their long season. Fay Vincent, the former MLB commissioner, had spoken about the difficulty in getting big-market audiences interested in watching small-market teams play one another. It hadn’t mattered when the revenues were tilted locally and the revenues from those R.S.N.s were thriving—but those days are over, and changing fan behavior doesn’t happen on a whim. Indeed, those losses in cable are increasing, not stabilizing, and specialty S.V.O.D.s for small-team markets will never make up for the ghosts of profits past. Integrating with a streaming ecosystem that’s looking to unify television—which Google and Amazon are clearly working toward across their operating systems, platforms, and third-party stores—could make baseball accessible again for the first time in years, leveraging its current popularity. Media executives typically have strong salesmanship but lack product focus—mostly because they haven’t needed it until now. To manifest a profitable future, you have to meet people where they are, even if they seem icky at the outset. Aggregation plays through Amazon (and Google) are always contested—remember when former WarnerMedia executives removed HBO Max (prior to the Max change) from Prime Video Channels to own the audience relationship? Under David Zaslav, Max returned. Other companies, like Comcast, go back and forth on whether to put Peacock into the Amazon Channels offering. But even a slightly slimmed-down nationalized deal between the MLB and Amazon that worked within the Channels ecosystem could help boost overall viewership for viewers already in the Prime ecosystem—a one-stop shop in a busy marketplace. According to this framework, MLB could partner with Amazon and Google, and work out its challenges with ESPN—albeit on a smaller deal, perhaps. This arrangement would lead to stronger reach on the national games, a much better integration system for smaller teams’ own streaming efforts through the Channels businesses, and a clear way to leverage online discovery. It could make all the difference for a league trying to retrain its audience to expect to find a game and be able to watch without hassle. Amazon has seemed very willing to deepen its MLB relationship; YouTube ostensibly less so. As for ESPN, I’ll leave that one to Manfred and Pitaro, but I think it makes sense for both of them.

The Inner Circle cheap seats—sort of an oxymoron I suppose (blame Marchand!)—will begin next week. In the meantime, send feedback to me or directly to Julia at JAlexander@puck.news. See you Thursday, John