Baseball's New Commissioner: A Lesson CBS could teach him

Okay, the white smoke has appeared, and in a move that surprised no one, Bud Selig's wingman Rob Manfred has been named the next commissioner of Major League Baseball. And there have been tons of posts out there outlining the Top 5 (or 3) (or 10) (or --this is clever -- 9) (you know, since baseball games take 9 hours to finish) Things that the New Commissioner of Baseball Must Do To Save the Game.

This is not one of those posts.

I don't pretend to have a wholly original perspective here, because numerous media-heads have made one specific point of concern here: that baseball's main audience is getting old, too old to keep it relevant.  (The median age for last year's World Series was over 50. The median age for the NBA Finals was just over 40.) 

Now, you can also find a few posts which suggest that the sky is  not falling yet for MLB. Television viewership in general is getting older, and that's because until recently, Neilsen was not tracking web viewing as part of its methods of calculating viewership. Since sitting in front of the tube is becoming a bit of an outmoded way of consuming television, naturally us old folks -- I'm in my mid-forties -- are the ones less likely to use mobile devices (though I do stream on my smartTV instead of using cable).

I'm nevertheless inclined to see the glass half-empty for the sport, and this is especially the case because young folks are not rushing out to play it, let alone watch it.  Now here's a little history lesson for you.

For several generations CBS had dominated American broadcasting.  Not just television, but radio before that.  Amid the swirling cultural changes of the late sixties, CBS maintained its position on top with shows that seemed not at all to take those changes into account: Green Acres, Hee Haw,  Petticoat Junction , Gunsmoke, Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle and Mayberry RFD (both spinoffs of The Andy Griffith Show).  All these shows enjoyed years in the top thirty, often top ten, and several of them were still highly rated when they were canceled.  By the 1971-72 season, all but Gunsmoke (an institution of a Western that started on radio) were gone.  (Hee-Haw survived through the seventies in syndication.) 

What happened?  The executives at CBS realized that they were appealing to an older, rural demographic with such programming, and that they were not gaining the desirable markets in their network-owned-and-operated stations in the big cities.  They sought a younger, urban, more educated audience, and went after it: The Mary Tyler Moore Show (debut 1970-71), All in the Family (1971-72), M*A*S*H  (1972-73), The Bob Newhart Show (1972-73).  These shows changed American television comedy, and people working on these programs went on to produce other classics of American TV for the next twenty years.  AITF was the number one show on tv for five consecutive seasons, the last great consensus of American television programming. 

CBS did not totally abandon its older audience; the rural drama set in the Depression, The Waltons, became a staple, for example, but that's a key point: it was a drama, not a sitcom.  Cop shows remained popular for all the networks, and CBS had its share, the most successful and longest lasting being the original  Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980).  But the network understood this: the product of television is not the programming, it's the audience.  CBS was in the business of selling viewers to sponsors, and that's why it altered its lineup in the early seventies.

The change was not as dramatic as it may sound in this short recap, but it was significant in the long run.  CBS could not have kept its programming as it was, or appeal only to an older audience.  Baseball may face the same situation -- as long as there are fifty-somethings who will turn on the set, they're fine, but what happens when they're gone?