Major League Baseball needs new fans, but thanks to San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler and several Giants players, baseball now finds itself in an unpopular culture war.
Kapler became the first MLB manager on record to kneel for the national anthem before Monday night’s exhibition game against the Oakland Athletics. Four Giants players also knelt for the anthem: Mike Yastrzemski, Austin Slater, Jaylin Davis, and Antoan Richardson.
At a time when MLB’s growth is already in trouble, it was a bad move on their part. They’re free to be activists to make better lives for black Americans, but disrespecting the American flag and national anthem isn’t going to help their cause — and it will hurt the league they compete in.
The league’s popularity is declining already. Attendance has dropped pretty substantially in recent times. In 2007, 80 million people attended regular season MLB games, including repeat fans. Last year, that number dropped to 68.5 million. The league’s fan base is also getting older and is at risk of dying off. In 2017, the average MLB fan was 57 years old, up from 52 in 2006. Additionally, just 7% of their fans were under the age of 18, even though minors were about one-fourth of the population on the 2010 census.
Additionally, MLB has done a terrible job marketing its star players. Nearly 4 in 5 people don’t know who Mike Trout is, according to a 2018 Washington Post poll, even though he is arguably the top MLB player. Now think about how many people have heard of Christian Yelich, Cody Bellinger, Nolan Arenado, and Juan Soto. Outside of their home markets, probably not many.
Worse yet, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 MLB season is almost sure to be a disaster. Players such as former Cy Young Award winner David Price and Washington Nationals third baseman Ryan Zimmerman, two of the longest-tenured players in the game, are among those who have opted out of playing this season. Fans likely won’t be able to attend any games this season, hurting the sport’s growth potential. Plus, the regular season is only 60 games rather than the normal 162, giving people less exposure to the league.
Amid all of those problems, Kapler and his players decide to go out and do something divisive — and unpopular with MLB’s right-leaning fan base.
NFL players such as former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and others kneeling for the national anthem was not a good look for football. A 2017 Washington Post poll found that 53% of people felt as though it was never appropriate to kneel for the national anthem. Over the course of the 2016 and 2017 NFL seasons, the league’s TV ratings declined by more than 17%. A JD Power poll and a UBS poll both found that the top reason for fans tuning out was the anthem protests.
If Kapler is serious about social justice, maybe he should have knelt during the Israeli national anthem to protest the country’s strict laws regarding interfaith marriage when coaching the Israeli World Baseball Classic team in 2013.
Regardless, Kapler, Slater, Richardson, Davis, and Yastrzemski aren’t going to change anything about society with some empty gesture. It’s just another useless virtue signal like The Simpsons voice actors stepping away, Trader Joe’s renaming a few of their products, or Aunt Jemima changing its logo.
Hopefully, MLB addresses the topic and quashes these protests before they spread and damage the league’s already wounded reputation.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
