Spending a day walking around Flushing, Queens — home to the New York Mets — I visited restaurants, gift shops and a hair salon. My mission on opening day of the wild-card series in Queens: To write about the connection between the team and one of the largest Chinatowns in North America.
Some folks I talked to are marginal baseball fans, following the team late in the season if there’s a chance at postseason victory. Most of the Asian immigrants I interviewed didn’t follow the sport, explaining they really don’t have the time or do not understand the game.
With 1.2 million Asians in the city of New York according to the 2020 Census and a team located smack dab in the midst of Asiatown, that’s a missed opportunity. Immigrants from East Asian countries of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan play baseball in their home countries. Somehow, they drop the ball on the All-American sport when arriving to America.
It’s no secret that Major League Baseball is losing fans, with MLB reporting a loss of 11 million in-person paying fans between 2007 and 2019. And it’s no secret that the demographics of the fan base are older and less diverse, with a median fan age of 57 and clocking in at 60% white, according to Morning Consult.
Sure, the league has studied many ways to attract new fans from shortening the games for a generation with short attention spans to edicts such as banning the shift to allow more hits. But one surefire way to get new fans is to appeal to the diversity of a team’s base and the diversity of America.
Attracting new and diverse fans is critical for the future of MLB, said Jane Son, co-lead of the Amazin’ Mets Foundation.
“For the Mets, as residents of the most diverse borough in one of the most diverse cities in the world, we welcome all to Citi Field,” she said. “It is certainly at the top of mind for us to ensure that we are supporting those in our community and creating a fun and inclusive environment for all fans to not only come and enjoy a baseball game but cheer on the Mets.”
I grew up in the shadow of Shea Stadium, attending Mets games in the early 1980s as a tween and teen after my family moved from Los Angeles. An odd hobby for an Asian immigrant girl, but one I easily adopted to was memorizing stats and keeping scorecards. As I sat in the stands of several Mets games this season four decades after my childhood summers at Shea, I wondered why there aren’t more fans like me?
More: Citi Field’s ideal locationThe stadium’s connection to Flushing
That’s an issue I raised with Yi Liu. Like me, he is an immigrant who grew up in Queens so close to Shea Stadium he could walk there. But he never caught baseball fever like I did. His peers in high school never integrated him and his parents were not baseball fans. His teen children don’t follow the sport.
Parental influence is a big factor in whether a kid picks up on the sport. The families out at the ball games are all passing on generational knowledge. Often, immigrants don’t know the players. Then, there are the electronic distractions. I tried to get my daughter interested in baseball to no avail. She’s busy Instagramming and studying. Second in importance to parental influence is peer influence. If her friends followed the sport, she would too.
Players should represent diversity
So how do you get in the influencers interested? This is a controversial idea: get players who represent the diversity of the community. I had an argument with a friend on this and he said he just want good players who will win for his team. So do I. But we’re already immersed fans. We’re talking attracting new people to become fans of the sport. I didn’t have parents who could teach me about baseball. But when I was a kid in Los Angeles, all the kids talked about the Dodgers, with the team doing a great job of community outreach. When kids or even adults meet a baseball player, it’s a big deal. That’ll prompt them to talk about it with their friends and research the player and the team. It’s how fan bases grow. Just ask the politicians who go door-to-door.
Consider the effects of Fernadomania in Los Angeles four decades ago. Fernando Valenzuela burst on to the Dodgers scene in 1981 as a rookie pitching phenom. That one player changed the face of the Dodgers Stadium for decades to come, transforming Latinos into baseball and Dodgers fans. “Los Doyers,” Chicanos called their team. During recent Dodgers games I’ve attended, a good percentage of the fans were Latino. That wasn’t the case before Fernando. The word-of-mouth, the excitement and the fear of missing out drew new fans to the sport thanks to the superstar Mexican pitcher.
In my recent travels to Puerto Rico, the late Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente is still honored and revered on the island, even though he died in 1972. Today, Puerto Ricans root for Mets’ closer Edwin Diaz.
Fans look to players who they can relate to. Attracting diverse players means attracting a diverse fan base. According to Zippia.com 2022 MLB demographics, Latinos represent 7.2% of MLB players, Blacks 6.8% and Asians 3.9%.
Asians are the newest group of ball players that teams are scouting. Asian professional leagues like Nippon Professional Baseball of Japan, Korea Baseball Organization and The Chinese Professional Baseball League of Taiwan are all places to recruit along with Asian American athletes in the United States.
Los Angeles Angels pitcher Shoshei Ohtani is as big of a star it gets, with the exception of Yankee slugger Aaron Judge. Japanese press follow him everywhere along with Yu Darvish, the biracial Japanese pitcher on the San Diego Padres. It was Darvish who held Mets’ offense in a 7-1 underdog victory in game one of the wild-card series. Moving past the wild-card series, who can forget Padre’s Ha-seong Kim’s daring slide into home base in the first divisional game against the Dodgers Tuesday night? The Cleveland Guardians’ Stephen Kwan — who is an American-born Chinese — has hot potential for Rookie of the Year honors in the American League, hitting a solo home run off Yankees’ Gerrit Cole Tuesday in AL division game one.
There’s much groundwork to be done for baseball to regain its status as the national pastime. All teams have to be competitive, not just the perennial wealthy teams such as the Dodgers and the Yankees. Baseball is the only major American sport not to employ a hard salary cap, putting small markets at a disadvantage. In a 2021 Washington Post poll, 11% of adults named baseball as their favorite sport to watch, well behind football at 34% and tied with basketball.
As America is changing, so should baseball. Tweak the game to make it more relevant to a younger generation. And recruit players that represent the current demographics of this country. It’s a playbook that businesses are employing to appeal to a wide swath of customers. Baseball is as big of a business as it gets.
Mary Chao is a columnist who covers the Asian communities and real estate in North Jersey. Email mchao@northjersey.com.
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