\n\tToday\u2019s guest column is from professors John Cairney and Rick Burton.<\/p>\n
\n\tDozens 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn each of those situations, a small group of individuals must defend something worth preserving. Kind of made us think about Major League Baseball\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tNotably, if MLB<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \n\tIt made us want to page back through Kotler and Singh\u2019s legendary paper \u201cMarketing Warfare in the 1980s\u201d as well as Ries and Trout\u2019s 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 \u201cposition, flank, preemptive, counteroffensive, mobile and contraction.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBaseball\u2019s 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\u2019s most popular and largest revenue-generating professional league. Maybe games like basketball or soccer will, but baseball doesn\u2019t have nearly the global reach of those sports.<\/p>\n \n\tThat, 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\u2019s Kurt Badenhausen, as of 2025, every MLB franchise was worth<\/a> at least $1.3 billion (the Miami Marlins), with the average for MLB\u2019s 30 teams hovering around $2.82 billion.<\/p>\n \n\tBut 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\u2019s TV viewership is 57, despite youth-facing improvements such as the pitch clock, shouldn\u2019t MLB be thinking about what it can do to attract 10-year-olds in the future?<\/p>\n \n\tBefore we fall into the convenient trap of burying MLB, we took to heart Maury Brown\u2019s April 2025 column for Forbes, where he suggested: \u201cMajor League Baseball has been portrayed as having fans that are too old. That the league is \u2018dying\u2019. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn fact, Brown noted, \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n