With the swing of a bat, another October came and went for those of us who love baseball. As languid and habitual as the rest of the season can feel, October baseball at its best is pure chaos: Night after night, there’s a promise of something new, that you might see something that’s never happened before and get to talk about it for years to come. The winner-takes-all Game 7 on Saturday, between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers, was one of those nights — and maybe, hopefully, the beginning for a whole new group of fans.
Around 26 million people in the US watched the game on Saturday, making it the most-watched World Series game since 2017. Across the border, 45 percent of the Canadian population tuned in for at least part of Game 7. Viewership peaked at 31.5 million in the US between 11:30PM and 11:45PM ET — impressive considering it was Halloween weekend and people were likely out and about (I personally was huddled over a single phone in the corner of a bar with a bunch of other people, screaming at every consequential play). The final game — a nail-biter featuring extra innings and a benches-clearing moment — was an instant classic, capping off a regular season for Major League Baseball that also saw big increases in viewership. When you add in viewer data from Japan, Game 7 was the most-watched MLB game in 34 years; more international viewers watched this World Series than ever before.
Still, baseball as a whole has been in something of a slump: viewership and attendance is down from decades prior, and it’s lost the title of “America’s pastime,” at least according to surveys. (More than 127 million people watched Super Bowl LIX this year, for comparison.)
Teams are trying to reach younger, more diverse audiences through social media
Perhaps with that in mind, teams are trying to reach younger, more diverse audiences through social media and even Hello Kitty bobbleheads. MLB has also introduced a handful of changes to liven up (and speed up) games, like a pitch clock and automatic “ghost runners” on base in extra innings. Next season there will be so-called robot umpires at home plate. The league is also going hard for the enticing and lucrative market in Japan, a place where baseball has been a national pastime for as long as I can remember.
The World Series viewership numbers are a promising sign of an upswing. But can the league and teams build off of existing momentum and create a new subset of fans? On Friday night I started seeing multiple jewelry Instagram accounts posting about players’ very pretty — and very expensive — jewelry. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s diamond-encrusted number pendant hanging around his neck; Miguel Rojas’ dainty Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra Collection dotting his earlobes and neck; Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s sapphire tennis necklace, glittering as he closed out a heroic Game 7 after throwing 96 pitches the day prior. It’s certainly possible the people running these accounts are baseball fans year-round, but I had never seen them discuss it before, and in any case, players wearing Van Cleef jewelry has been something of a subplot all season long. Did the jewelry accounts flip the game on out of curiosity and discover that there was something for them, too?
On TikTok it was more of the same — a new group of viewers, brought into baseball through different storylines and quirks. Fashion people analyzed players’ outfits and K-pop fans made photo cards of players like they would for their favorite members of groups — “Kpopifying sports,” as one person put it. Posts containing hashtags related to the World Series surged over the last few weeks on the platform, according to Kat Marquez, lead of North America sports league partnerships at TikTok: #worldseries, with 2.8 million global posts, was up 160 percent; #dodgers posts were up 210 percent; and #bluejays posts were up 325 percent between October 21st and November 3rd.
One of my favorite things to watch on TikTok are fan edits (often made by users who appear to be teenagers) of game highlights stitched together with some trending song overlaid. They often have frenetic cuts, over-the-top transition effects, and dramatic filters: Here’s the New York Yankees’ Cody Bellinger set to Ethel Cain, which is actually just a video longing for Bellinger’s time on the Dodgers; the Seattle Mariners winning their division title set to “Honor to Us All” from Disney’s Mulan; and the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and rookie Rōki Sasaki with Taylor Swift’s “Father Figure” in the background. If MLB wants help reaching new, young audiences, they should take a page out of Hollywood’s book and simply hire the TikTok fan editors to help them market players.
Bluesky on Saturday night felt as livebloggy as it ever has — traffic to the site spiked during the game. Again, people I had never seen mention baseball were right there with the sports fans, all of us holding our breaths through each agonizing and euphoric moment.
Baseball broke containment. (If you, too, were suddenly scooped up into the frenzy of this World Series, there’s good news: the World Baseball Classic starts in 120 days.)
Baseball resonates as culture because it’s just another way to tell stories: the fairy tale cut short for the Seattle Mariners, or Guerrero Jr.’s quest to win a World Series championship ring and give it to his dad, himself a former pro baseball player. There were the improbable heroes who were added to the roster last minute and went on to create iconic moments. And then of course there’s Ohtani, perhaps the greatest to ever play the game, who is finally able to win multiple World Series in spectacular fashion after playing (and losing) for six years on the Los Angeles Angels.
Baseball resonates as culture because it’s just another way to tell stories
There are also, of course, meta narratives. The trade war waged by Donald Trump against Canada, where the Blue Jays are based, has spiraled into a messy diplomatic conflict between America and one of its closest allies. An ad that ran during the first game embroiled the World Series in a political fight between Trump and Canadian leaders. The games themselves were largely apolitical, but the mess at the highest levels of power was still a shadow over it all.
More than a quarter of MLB players on the roster for opening day this year were born outside of the US, including some of the league’s biggest stars — it is one of the best parts of baseball, as American as the sport itself. But as the Dodgers played this weekend in Toronto, federal immigration agents continued their siege of the Los Angeles area, at times wearing Halloween masks while conducting raids. A third of the population of Los Angeles is foreign-born, and it is represented by a team that is as diverse as it is — a city of immigrants with its back against the wall as its team goes back to back. We watch baseball for these stories, too.
MLB has taken the adapt-or-die mindset to heart, taking a sport that feels ancient (complimentary) and tweaking it for a modern audience. Early signs point to MLB’s new strategies paying off. So much of what elevates a pastime into big-C Culture comes from how the public engages with it: the critiques and analysis, the fan edits, the memes, the live reactions, the packed stadiums and watch parties and look-alike contests and parades in cities under attack. We were truly spoiled by this postseason, and I already feel those tinges of nostalgia that will deepen as time passes until I’m the ancient one telling the kids about the 2025 World Series.