1. Hire a tech-savvy kid to design a software program aimed at helping elementary school children learn math through learning baseball. Better yet, hold a nationwide competition (something like the National Spelling Bee) with a prize for the student who comes up with the best teaching tool. Offer the prize-winning software program free to public schools. I owe this idea to my late uncle, Oswald Jacoby, a newspaper columnist and a bridge and backgammon champion from the 1930s until his death in 1984. He wanted to use both poker and bridge to teach math in the 1960s—when he felt children’s math skills were declining—but no schools took him up on it. Poker may have been the sticking point. Sadly, my uncle died before the era of personal computers, for which he would certainly have crafted a program himself.
2. Offer free seats for every afternoon game to every child under fifteen who comes to the ballpark with an adult. The early teens, according to every study, are the age when the young—even if they played baseball in elementary school—begin to lose interest. Accompaniment by an adult is important to encourage families to attend. Advertise these games unceasingly.
3. Inundate women’s organizations with information about the relative safety of baseball as a sport for children. Parents of both sexes are increasingly concerned about youthful concussions, and this is a particularly strong selling point for mothers. Make a special point of reaching out to African-American women’s organizations, given baseball’s need to draw more black fans as well as young fans. The point is not only to get more mothers to come to ballgames with their children but to persuade mothers to encourage their children to play baseball.
4. Make fluency in English a mandatory aspect of player development in the minor leagues. This means you, Major League Baseball, and you, the Major League Baseball Players Association. You know that only 10 percent of minor league players ever get to play in the majors. This is an issue that primarily affects Hispanic players today, since Asian players are usually stars in their own countries before they come to play in the United States. I know, I know, M.L.B. talks about its English instruction in Dominican academies, but few of the graduates speak English well even when they reach the major leagues after spending time in the minor leagues in the United States. Being able to talk to the press is part of the job. For the 90 percent of minor leaguers who do not make it to the majors, having spent years without learning English means they are unfit for any other decently paid job in the United States. There are some first-generation Hispanic Americans with the same problem. If Dominican and Hispanic-American players do get to the majors, inability to express themselves in English will deprive them of some of the recognition they deserve. And if they don’t—well, you have taken their young years and left them with no nonbaseball education. Improving English instruction and treating it as a part of baseball training will help baseball develop its young stars, and—oh, yes—it’s the right thing to do.
5. Day games should be the rule, not the exception, on weekends—during the regular season and the postseason. (This is my least original suggestion, and I know it’s not going to happen because it isn’t what sponsors want. But it certainly would expand the school-age audience for baseball.)
6. Make special outreach efforts to girls in your Play Ball program for young children. I know the program is open to everyone, but in every picture I see of these groups, nearly everyone is a boy. Are girls not interested, or do they feel unwelcome? Just asking.
7. When you take a kid to a ballgame, give her an interesting baseball book afterward. There are so many wonderful books about baseball that it should be possible to find the right one for every child. Try both the sublime (for example, Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times) and the ridiculous (like The Baseball Hall of Shame, by Bruce Nash and Allen Zullo).
8. Think twice about investments in commercial fantasy baseball operations that are really a way of making money from sports gambling. You know, owners. You know, players. Anytime baseball has become involved with gambling, however indirectly, it doesn’t turn out well. I know that fantasy baseball games can’t be “fixed” in the way that a real game can be fixed by the deliberate malfeasance of star players. But trying to hook younger fans by investing in entities that may, in turn, hook them on a potential vice as old as recorded history is, well, unworthy of the national pastime. “Statsy” fans who aren’t compulsive gamblers and who want to play fantasy sports will do so anyway.
9. Tony Clark, the head of the players’ union, has talked frequently about the need for baseball to promote its stars in order to attract young fans. We all know about the epidemic of opioid addiction in this country. How about sending some of your young stars to schools, youth groups, and events like the Little League World Series, to talk about the dangers of opioid use? You think kids wouldn’t take the word of Aaron Judge or Jacob deGrom over lectures from their parents or the high school nurse? Conspicuous community service is one of the best ways to showcase players—and it might even save some lives.
10. Oh, please, revisit, and revisit again, plans to attract more young baseball fans by instituting changes that will make the game less like… well, baseball. Remember the mistake that the Coca-Cola company made back in the 1980s when it tried to attract Pepsi drinkers by producing the sickly sweet abomination called New Coke. No business ever reinvented itself by abandoning its unique selling propositions, regardless of how tempting that bogus solution always is to short-term thinkers. Baseball’s unique selling propositions are timelessness, logic, and history. Successful marketers, while they’re always adding on to the basic appeal of their products, are, above all, people who can present their traditional product in a more interesting way. How about a marketing campaign based on an idea like “Baseball: The Grownup Game for Kids”? Market the real thing.