In A Waning Era Of All-Star Games, Baseball’s Midsummer Classic Still Holds Up

MLB offers up the best example of why sports still need a star-studded showcase.

All-Star Games seem to be an endangered species in the modern era of big-time sports. What once were battles for league or conference bragging rights — and special showcases for talents that most fans would never get to see play otherwise — have turned into exhibition games that don’t always have a compelling reason to exist and often verge into sham territory. The NFL’s Pro Bowl became such a joke in recent years that the traditional game itself was scrapped in favor of skills competitions and flag football in 2023.

But there is an exception to the general trend of All-Star malaise. MLB’s midsummer classic, which will be held Tuesday night at 8 p.m. ET in Seattle, may be the only example of the genre that actually stays true to the normal version of its sport and still holds onto its original appeal for fans — which is great for fans looking forward to watching Shohei Ohtani, Ronald Acuña Jr. and the rest of baseball’s top stars do what they do best.

Consider how these star-studded products take shape on the field. As I wrote about a few years ago, the NBA, NHL and NFL’s All-Star Games are typically ridiculous score-fests that devolve into funhouse-mirror versions of their respective sports. Compared with the regular season, per-game scoring was up 40 to 50 percent in basketball and football’s All-Star events, and it spiked by a ludicrous 236 percent in hockey before the NHL gave up on any semblance of a real game and adopted its current 3-on-3 tournament format. While lots of offense sounds exciting on paper, too much of it can turn the experience sour.

But in baseball, the All-Star Game actually looks and plays pretty similar to the real thing:

If anything, offense is weaker in MLB’s All-Star Game than it is in normal games — probably a testament to a parade of lights-out bullpen arms making their way to the mound even earlier than usual. But while that OBP is a little lower than we’d probably like, the dip there is driven mostly by fewer walks (not exactly the sexiest event in baseball anyway), and more exciting things like hits and home runs happen with relatively normal frequency. An unrecognizable farce of a game, this is not.

And that seems to translate in fans’ willingness to watch. Most major televised sports are drawing fewer eyeballs now than in the past — with the possible exception of the NFL, which improved its total viewership and even its Nielsen rating for last year’s Super Bowl — a trend the MLB All-Star Game is not immune to by any means. But at the same time, baseball’s All-Star ratings have held up better in terms of total audience than its counterparts in either basketball or football, with the 2022 midsummer classic drawing 7.5 million viewers, or 820,000 more than the NFL’s and 1.2 million more than the NBA’s (both events that saw their audience continue to plummet in 2023).

It is true that baseball’s festivities were starting from a greater position of strength two decades ago than either the NFL’s or NBA’s. But the most recent MLB All-Star Game also retained a greater share of its peak viewership from over that span (51.5 percent) than either the most recent Pro Bowl (46.9 percent) or especially the NBA’s latest All-Star Game (42.6 percent). And in fact, baseball’s All-Star Game viewership has declined less relative to its 2003-2022 peak than the World Series, which was down to 46.3 percent of its peak viewership last fall.

All of which is to say, more people still seem to be sticking around for MLB’s superstar showcase than for any other event in its class. Between the excitement of watching the game’s most electric talent — I know I will have my eyes glued to guys like Acuña, Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Wander Franco — the tradition (as of Tuesday, there will have been 93 of these things!), the nostalgic feeling it elicits in longtime fans and the fact that it actually resembles real baseball, there’s just something special about this All-Star Game that you simply don’t get in other sports.

Filed under: Baseball