Former MLB star Curtis Granderson has a perfect solution to baseball’s marketability problem.
It’s no secret that MLB has a problem with its marketability.
The sport has a modern day Mickey Mantle in Mike Trout, yet people might know him more as a Subway spokesperson than a future Hall of Famer. In Shohei Ohtani, the league has a modern day Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson rolled into one player, a historically great and significant player for the game.
Add to that the likes of insanely talented fun young stars like Fernando Tatis Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Ronald Acuna Jr., and so many others and you begin to see how entertaining and top level baseball should be in North America.
Yet it isn’t.
Trout has toiled away in the shadows for years, the most ESPN talked about Shohei Ohtani recently was due to very ignorant and xenophobic things said about him by Stephen A. Smith, and the only time Tatis has been seen in markets like Minnesota, Boston, and Dallas is when shipments of MLB The Show arrive.
Curtis Granderson has a solution to baseball’s marketability issue. To the former Tigers, Yankees, and Mets star, the idea that the baseball season is as long as it is but not every team plays against one another each year hurts the growth of the game and its stars.
“With 162 games it’s amazing that an individual like Shohei Ohtani may not come play the Cubs for a while. So the fans in Chicago might not get a chance to see that player,” Granderson said. “That slight change can help market without having to do a lot of different things.”
It’s hard for any league to evenly spread out its superstar talent to new markets, but baseball plays more games the second-longest professional sports schedule in the first half of its season (both the NBA and NHL play 82-games).
Baseball making sure that its current must-see generation of talent is actually seen by fans across the country is a critical piece of the sports evolution and survival. The sport has exists for almost 150 years and will exist for another, but the trick is to make sure people are still watching and that the talent is being fairly advertised to fans.
Curtis Granderson spoke on behalf of No Kid Hungry.