In a world with the NFL dominating television ratings and the NBA crushing social media numbers, Major League Baseball is trying to find it’s place. The progress that is currently happening might be considered slow, but there is an attempt. Still, nationally, the sport is struggling to garner large swaths of support. This week’s accomplishments by Shohei Ohtani are a clear indicator of how far MLB has to go.
Ohtani struck out a career-high thirteen batters on Wednesday night in a 5-0 win by the Angels against the Kansas City Royals. That followed a performance on Tuesday in which the man drove in eight batters. Wild, right? That’s what Mark Willard and Dan Dibley of Willard and Dibs on 95.7 The Game thought and wondered why it hasn’t been a bigger deal.
Willard asked who is to blame. “Is that a Major League Baseball problem? Is it because baseball doesn’t showcase their players? Or is it a baseball problem that people don’t care about baseball anymore?
Dibley chimed in with a shot at the league and it’s social and marketing arms.
“It’s all the above. I put the majority of the blame on Major League Baseball because it is so hard as a fan to share their content. If you were to capture the video of one of his great outings and you tweet it out or put it on your social media, MLB shuts you down… They want to be bale to share it, use it own their way. But MLB, ‘without the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball’ and all that malarkey. As a result from a marketing standpoint, they’re god awful.
Dibley asked the listener to think about it in terms of an NFL performace.
“Patrick Mahomes goes out and he’s 27/35, 412 yards and 4 TDs… and he had 12 tackles and a pick-six and a forced fumble. I mean, what? Our minds would be blown right?
Willard then said he think that the sport and the viewers’ attention span are at odds.
“I think part of it too, baseball is out of step with the pace of our lives now,” Willard said. “Baseball is like a novel that takes a long time to unfold… people are like ‘give me something that matters now’. That’s just how we are geared right now.”
That could be a problem, but Dibley said things could change if MLB seized this opportunity for attention like they did once before.
“If MLB treated Shohei Ohtani’s sporting life like they did the Barry Bonds home run chase, where Barry Bonds is coming up to bat, we are going to go live to Barry Bonds in the on-deck circle, he’s swinging a donut… Shohei Ohtani should have that treatment.”
I should always know when he’s batting,” continued Dibley. “When he’s pitching, how long it’ll be until that happens, where can I go to watch it live. If you didn’t follow the Angels and if you don’t follow baseball, you weren’t aware that Ohtani was going to pitch the day after he had eight runs batted in.”