Baseball gets its hooks into you early. The game starts winning you over at around the same time you’re still heavily invested in dinosaurs or sharks or whatever and your adult front teeth start coming in—leaving you with a vaguely beaverish look until proportionality does its thing—and before you know it, you’re a fan. Unless you’re some kind of weasel, the emotional attachment you develop during your footy-pajamas years, often abetted by your dad, stays with you for life.
Eventually you grow into your luxury bones and make some smaller versions of yourself who will wind up glomming onto the team you like, a process which will repeat itself until the sun burns out like a dollar-store lightbulb and we all join the dinosaurs in their Stygian redoubt beyond the bounds of spacetime. Unless your dad was a soccer guy, in which case: Congratulations on being an insufferable weirdo.
Science backs this up. Well, not science per se, but data. According to Playfly Sports research, nearly a quarter (23%) of Major League Baseball fans become indoctrinated by the time they’re 7 years old, and more than half (52%) will have developed a rooting interest for a particular ballclub by age 12. Seventy percent of MLB enthusiasts, or approximately 118.8 million people, will have cemented their fandom on or before their 17th birthday. No other sport baits the trap as early as baseball does, and as is the case with most things that take hold when your personality is still forming (organized religion, naps), the buy-in tends to endure for the rest of your natural days.
As much as baseball naysayers are forever trying to bury the game, the bonds we forge in youth tend to last much longer than the late-bloomer stuff. Yes, you sort of have to swear off dinosaurs at a certain point in your emotional development—unless you’re a paleontologist, which … you’re not—but with baseball there’s no overstating the sentimentality factor. The whole thing is admittedly corny, but so is Field of Dreams, and if you don’t like movies where Kevin Costner “has a catch” with the ghost of his dad (a much-less-scary-than-usual Ray Liotta), then that’s a You Problem. Call your dad, by the way.
Anyway, Playfly CEO Craig Sloan is a lifelong Yankees Guy, and he spent Opening Day up at the Stadium, at ease about the economics of the game, yet at the same time on high alert. (We’ll get back to this shortly.) After years of riding herd on RSN ad sales, Sloan assumed day-to-day operational leadership of Playfly last September.
While the Yankees’ prospects for 2025 are looking a bit bleak in the absence of ace Gerrit Cole, who underwent season-ending Tommy John surgery two weeks ago, Sloan is primed for another lucrative campaign. “Businesswise, I’m pretty jacked on baseball again,” he said earlier this week during a Zoom call. “From a brand perspective, it certainly has helped our advertising sales unit to be able to go out into the market with a more stabilized story.”
The emergence of Main Street Sports Group (formerly known as Diamond Sports Group) from Chapter 11 protection after 20 months of bankruptcy hearings has not only given the company’s RSNs a new lease on life—the court’s approval of the re-org effectively wiped out $9 billion in debt—but has also allowed millions of baseball fans to breathe a little easier.
“If you look at it from a fan’s perspective, they’re not going into the season with a lot of controversy and uncertainty as to where their team is going to end up,” Sloan said. “It should be a pretty stable season, although I think the long-term evolution of where these media rights are going to migrate is still up in the air, especially when you think about what commissioner [Rob] Manfred has obviously been very public about for 2028.”
Whereas Main Street’s predecessor as recently as October of 2024 had planned to void all of its legacy MLB deals but for one, the company entered the new season with nine clubs under contract. Manfred has not been shy about his desire to seize control of MLB’s local rights when the league’s national packages expire in 2028, and the stressors on the legacy RSN model will only get more intense over the next three years. (The traditional pay-TV bundle is losing approximately 6.5 million customers every 12 months. At the end of 2024, the cable/satellite/telco-TV bundle had contracted to 46.9 million homes, putting overall reach at just 37% of all U.S. TV households—down from 91% in 2010.)
Sloan said the adoption of direct-to-consumer streaming packages should go a long way toward offsetting the drain on pay-TV, before noting that the RSNs remain the primary delivery system for in-game baseball impressions. Nearly 80% of all regular-season MLB consumption is done at the local level, and more than a quarter of the average franchise’s revenue is generated via media.
“The team owners are well aware that the RSNs drive their ecosystem,” Sloan said. “The idea that they will lose control of all of their broadcast abilities in their local markets—well, there’s almost no chance of that happening now. I think the groundswell has moved to Manfred aggregating more local and aggregating more content in general to take to market, but the owners want to speak to their fan bases at the local level for three-and-a-half-hours a night, including pre- and postgame.”
Baseball’s evolution from a national phenomenon to a more parochial obsession has made the RSNs the backbone of the sport’s economy, which is evident in the amount of ad revenue that gets generated each season on the local level. According to Sloan, the RSNs and various in-market affiliates that carry MLB packages will scare up more ad dollars than the league’s national partners, a function of sheer volume and outsized fan engagement.
The local outlets are also crucial for marketing in the “home voice” of a given club and the region it serves. RSNs and local stations are the prime movers behind the ticket sales that help engender a more lasting association between a team and its fans, and there are approximately 3.3 million seats to sell every summer. In the absence of a legacy local media presence, smaller-market clubs are likely to have an awful lot of unsold inventory on their hands.
“On a hot July day, people will drive a couple hours from all over Michigan to go to Comerica Park and watch their Tigers, and local TV is a big part of how the team creates those associations and gets the word out,” Sloan said. “And for that reason, I think the RSNs will remain an essential part of the media mix for many years to come.”
While MLB’s distribution scheme is expected to take a number of twists and turns before the decade is out, the sport’s popularity isn’t in doubt. With over 71.3 million spins of the turnstiles, the league last year put up its biggest attendance figures since 2017. And as the ballpark numbers grew, the TV audiences were up as well, especially among younger fans.
“Just by the very nature of its place on the sports calendar, where it sits there by itself for months at a time, the power of baseball is hard to beat,” Sloan said. “When Manfred talks about the incredible value of his media rights, he’s talking about a sport where in most major markets in the U.S., it’s the No. 1 program six months out of the year. How many sports can say that?”
While nothing throws a bucket of cold water on a hot advertising market like volatility, the MLB sales environment should hold up well in the near term. Sloan acknowledged that this has been one of the latest-breaking baseball markets he’s seen in a while, as scatter deals that are normally hashed out in January and February were still being transacted on Opening Day. Much of the local and national inventory was already spoken for at the end of last year’s fast-moving upfront bazaar, but this spring’s selloff is likely to be a much more prolonged affair, as advertisers continue to try to figure out which way the wind is blowing. (As a rule of thumb, the ad market tends to lag the “real world” by about two quarters, which should keep baseball in fine fettle through the end of the season regardless of what’s happening this summer on the macro level.)
Though there may be some pain in store for media sales down the road, Sloan said he probably got a much more uncomfortable jolt during his recent visit to Madison Square Garden. After a glitchy T-shirt cannon fired a wadded ball of cotton straight into his solar plexus, he said he’ll have his head on a swivel whenever he’s rooting for his baseball team up in the Bronx.
“I was just minding my business when suddenly I got drilled by a souvenir,” Sloan said. “It felt as though somebody had punched me as hard as they could in the stomach. I did hold onto the T-shirt, by the way. There was no way I was letting go of that.”
