The Attack on Fortress Baseball Comes From All Directions

Today’s guest column is from professors John Cairney and Rick Burton.

Dozens of movies built around the suspenseful premise of an outnumbered army or unit surrounded at a fortress and coming under fierce attack. The Alamo (1960) used to hold a primary position for that allegory, but others we might offer up include Night of the Living Dead, 300, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Sinners. For video gamers, think something like Assassins Creed.

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In each of those situations, a small group of individuals must defend something worth preserving. Kind of made us think about Major League Baseball’s owners and commissioner Rob Manfred, who not only face an aging fan demographic but also the real possibility of a lengthy strike/lockout looming on the labor peace horizon.

Notably, if MLB shuts down in 2027, as some are already hinting, it will happen less than a year after the three-country tidal surge of the FIFA 2026 World Cup.

It made us want to page back through Kotler and Singh’s legendary paper “Marketing Warfare in the 1980s” as well as Ries and Trout’s 1986 book Marketing Warfare. Those authors (and others) discussed strategic concepts for attacking market leaders with frontal attacks, flanking maneuvers and encirclement or, on the other hand, defensive strategies for market leaders such as “position, flank, preemptive, counteroffensive, mobile and contraction.”

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Baseball’s contemporary problem is defending ground rather than commanding it. The NFL took the highest hill by the early 1970s and MLB arguably has no hope of ever replacing football as America’s most popular and largest revenue-generating professional league. Maybe games like basketball or soccer will, but baseball doesn’t have nearly the global reach of those sports.

That, of course, is fine. Baseball is a wonderful game, MLB is a powerful league, and top players can earn salaries that are healthy percentages of billions. According to Sportico’s Kurt Badenhausen, as of 2025, every MLB franchise was worth at least $1.3 billion (the Miami Marlins), with the average for MLB’s 30 teams hovering around $2.82 billion.

But what market strategies (warfare or otherwise) should MLB executives consider, especially if there is even a remote chance they might shut MLB down within the next 14 months? If the average age of MLB’s TV viewership is 57, despite youth-facing improvements such as the pitch clock, shouldn’t MLB be thinking about what it can do to attract 10-year-olds in the future?

Before we fall into the convenient trap of burying MLB, we took to heart Maury Brown’s April 2025 column for Forbes, where he suggested: “Major League Baseball has been portrayed as having fans that are too old. That the league is ‘dying’. That MLB pales when compared to the NBA in terms of popularity on television. These narratives have followed MLB around like grim death. But that fact is, these are all largely myths.”

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In fact, Brown noted, “There has been [an ongoing] myth that baseball is the sport of old people and is out of touch with other sports leagues that skew to a younger generation. But data from Nielsen Scarborough shows the median age of an MLB fan is 54.04, below college football and the WNBA.”

Interestingly, the Nielsen data suggests the NFL, college basketball and NBA are also in the 50s. Only MLS, with a median age of 49, showed up in the forties.

To channel the wondering Alice, Nielsen’s numbers are curiouser and curiouser. Speaking of TV ratings, it is notable MLB is now producing broadcasts for around half the league, meaning the RSN landscape that previously protected the fort is under assault.

That said, without claiming insight into Manfred’s thinking or the professional counsel he’s receiving, several points seem clear:

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1. Don’t shut down in 2027. If you do, MLS (which, with its new calendar, will be playing meaningful games a the end of a truncated season in April and May of ’27, then starting the ’27-28 season in July) will be a massive beneficiary. In addition, a labor strike hurts every other league … in one way or another.

2. Understand perceptions of parity matter, and if there is no salary cap in MLB, young fans will find it increasingly difficult to support teams with no chance of competing. In other words, MLB could come to look like certain European football leagues where no more than two teams ever win the seasonal competition.

3. If the biggest stars in baseball are Japanese, South Korean or Latin American, think harder about flanking strategies that go around the NFL’s traditional reliance on North Americans. That said, don’t underestimate just how hard the NFL is working to make itself a global game.

4. Figure out how not to lose (or fail to leverage) the star power of great generational players like Mike Trout who appear on MLB’s dreamy fields but somehow never become famous faces like those from the NFL and NBA. Use league-driven storytelling, national showcase scheduling and coordinated digital/broadcast visibility rather than leaving star-making solely to local markets.

5. Understand that in this new creator economy, MLB can do better at having its players generate interesting material targeting younger audiences. As Syracuse media entrepreneurship professor Sean Branagan recently said (with italics emphasized), “Broadcasting must mean just that: the many telling the many.”

We’ll close by suggesting that baseball—and MLB—are not in crisis, but like pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training, the league must get back into shape for the sustained attacks already forming on the horizon. MLB may find itself surrounded by other competitors (as well as the growth of women’s professional leagues), but we hope it chooses to fight like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Rohirrim warriors at the Battle of Helm’s Deep.

John Cairney is head of the University of Queensland’s School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences. He also serves as deputy executive director for the Office of 2032 Games Engagement and directs Queensland’s Centre for Olympic and Paralympic Studies. Rick Burton is an honorary professor at UQ, Syracuse University’s David B. Falk Emeritus Professor of Sport Management, former commissioner of Australia’s National Basketball League, and co-author of the book, The Rise of Major League Soccer.

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