Ryder Cup global strategy proving effective while MLB touts positive impact of rule changes as season wraps up, watching the NFL in full animation and the XFL/USFL merger moving forward.
Top of the morning to you all. This is your Buzzcast for Friday, September 29th, and I'm SBJ senior writer Joe Lemire, teeing off the morning news in place of Abe Madkour.
Golf's Ryder Cup just got underway earlier this morning in Rome, and it's become bigger business than ever, even without the influence of LIV Golf. Brooks Koepka, by the way, is the only LIV Golfer competing for either the U.S. or Europe this weekend. But the Ryder Cup boasts a record seven global partners for this 2023 edition. Aon, BMW, Capgemini, Citi, DP World, Hilton, and Rolex are all on the roster. That's up from five at Whistling Straits in 2021, and just one at the 2018 tournament in France.
At the time, the governing bodies overseeing the Ryder Cup, the PGA of America, DP World Tour, and Ryder Cup Europe, pivoted from a predominantly local strategy to one that's global. My colleague Josh Carpenter has all this and more on sbj.com right now, and he reported that each is paying between seven and $10 million. Carpenter also noted how much the Ryder Cup has expanded beyond the main competition days. It's becoming a full week-long event. Practice sessions, live music and entertainment, a Pro-Am with Novak Djokovic and Gareth Bale, and so on.
Two years ago, the DP World Tour, Ryder Cup Europe, and sports marketing agency Two Circles joined forces to create Tour Consumer Experiences, and its head of North America, Sam Yardley, told Josh Carpenter that 50,000 are expected on the course daily, and for the first time tickets have completely sold out for the first time to the events on Wednesday and Thursday, before the real golf even started. This speaks to how well IP holders are doing in monetizing their flagpole events. Certainly the Super Bowl springs to mind for its associated events leading up to the game. Just this month, we saw the USTA find success with its Fan Week, essentially turning the U.S. Open into a three-week event. In major sports leagues, they've been doing the same with their all-star games for years. And the Ryder Cup is, after all, just about the closest that the world of golf gets to such an event.
On a separate note, both Ryder Cup Captain Zach Johnson and Luke Donald said earlier this week that they found the experience of captaining a squad far more challenging than competing in the tournament. That said, it's still clearly an honor. I had the chance to speak with Luke Donald for a while a few months ago, and at least at the time, he described his duty as very energizing, and he added, "In life, we always strive to be busy and have purpose of something that's really important to us." We'll see how it all plays out this weekend in Rome.
More than half of Major League Baseball players have already started booking their October tee times, but as the regular season enters its final weekend, the Orioles won their 100th game last night to improbably claim the AL East, and both the American and National Leagues have active wild card races ongoing. It's worth looking at how the rule changes implemented by the league, under the oversight of Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations Morgan Sword, a Sports Business Journal 40 Under 40 Hall of Famer, have gone. First off, attendance is set to crack 70 million this weekend, the best MLB mark since 2017. And according to data on Baseball Reference, the average time of a nine-inning game is two hours and 39 minutes this season, which would be the fastest pace since 1985. That's 31 full minutes shorter than the high watermark of two years ago, when games were drowning in dead time.
MLB didn't just want games to be shorter. The fan surveys it conducted all clamored for more action. Again, the rule changes have worked. The average time between balls and play has been three minutes and 13 seconds, the lowest such interval since 2009, and nearly 40 seconds less than two years ago. There obviously still were a lot of strikeouts, but in part because of defensive shift restrictions, balls that were hit into play had a better chance of netting a base runner. Batting average in balls in play jumped seven points year over year, and is back in line to where it had been holding steady for about 25 years before that.
Anthony Castrovince at MLB.com dug deep into the data and found that, at least for this first season, the pitch clock rules did not appear to impact injury rates for pitchers as some had feared, even though starting pitcher usage has remained consistent. MLB PR also noted that 65% of all games have been played without a single pitch clock timer violation, and the frequency of violations has steadily declined all season. In April, there were about three violations for every four games played. In September, it's been about one violation for every four games.
The 2023 season is on pace for the most stolen bases since 1987, and the league's 80.2% success rate on steals is the highest in baseball history. We all had a few laughs in spring training when managers such as Alex Cora described the new bases as pizza box size. They had a little bit of an impact, as well as some of the rule changes about how often you can throw over to first base.
This Sunday morning, NFL action will again go streaming only as the sport returns to London, to infinity, and to beyond. Fans have grown accustomed to firing up Amazon Prime Video to watch Thursday night football, and we all saw the Lions trounce the Packers last night, and now the league has another exclusive streaming game window with Sunday morning's Falcons-Jaguars contest in London. Not only will the traditional game broadcast be available solely to subscribers of ESPN+ and NFL+, but also it is the debut of an animated alternative cast Toy Story Funday Football.
Seeking to create a family-friendly viewing experience, ESPN and several partners including the NFL, Disney, Pixar, Beyond Sports, Silver Spoon, and AWS Next Gen Stats, will render the entire game as if it's being played in Andy's room, the boy we all know from the beloved four-film canon of Toy Story. Viewers on ESPN+, Disney+, and NFL+, will be able to tune into this alt cast. Woody, Buzz Light year, and all the favorites will be there. Duke Kaboom will do a motorcycle stunt at halftime. Slinky the dog will service the down and distance marker. And the on-air talent will don motion capture suits and be embedded in the animated realm. It promises to be fun and appeal to the younger audience every sport is desperately seeking, but there will be teaching moments too in hopes of engaging those young fans enough that they'll want to come back, even if Mr. Potato Head isn't roaming the sideline.
Many of you will remember that ESPN tried a similar experiment in March with the Big City Greens Classic, an NHL game between the Rangers and Capitals that was presented in the setting of the Disney cartoon by that name. It was a smash hit. Not only was the anecdotal feedback strong, complete with a litany of social media posts circulating of mesmerized children in front of the screen, but it also set an ESPN record by drawing a larger portion of the total audience than any other alternate game presentation, including the ManningCast.
Now admittedly, it's not exactly an apple to apples comparison. Monday Night Football regularly draws 14 million total fans, and the Mannings claim about 10% of that audience. The NHL game only had 765,000 total viewers on its linear channels, so the ManningCast at 1.4 million gets double that. But in terms of percentages, a significantly higher share watched the animated version, Big City Greens Classic, than the 10% or so that the ManningCast gets. Also, the Disney viewers were notably younger, in the 12 to 14 year old range, and more female, about 59%, than is typical.
Sunday's version is not only a new sport and a new film IP. ESPN's creative directors praise Pixar's willingness to share their digital assets to make it a hit. But also has a key upgrade behind the scenes. While the NHL game relied only on NHL Edge, the league's puck and player tracking system provided by SMT, the sensors in that system only ping a single location for each skater, and this is what Beyond Sports uses to recreate the action in the animated world. The Sunday NFL game will have access not only to the Zebra Technologies sensors, which feed the AWS-powered Next Gen Stats, but also an optical tracking system that will provide more than two dozen points on each football player's body. That will help Beyond Sports animate each athlete more distinctly and in more detail, and it'll help with replays.
NHL gameplay, of course, is more free flowing, so the Big City Greens Classic only had about two dozen replays of goals and big saves, and was predominantly shown from the standard high center ice view throughout the game. NFL action, of course, typically has more than 150 plays, each of which is whistled to a close, and most are followed by replays. The Beyond Sports team told me they'll sync the two tracking systems to offer new vantage points on each play. In fact, they can recreate the action from anywhere on the field, even where it would be impossible to have a camera. Anyone who remembers the World League from 30 years ago remembers the rudimentary helmet-cams that players wore. Well, on Sunday, we'll see those same kinds of first person perspectives in the animated world.
For those curious about more behind-the-scenes information, check out my detailed story on the SBJ site this morning, and feel free to reach out Monday with what you thought of the broadcast. You can find me at JayLemire@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
And here are just a few more headlines as we set off into a new month. Fenway Sports Group has sold a roughly 3% stake in Liverpool FC to Dynasty Equity. According to Michael Silverman of the Boston Globe, the deal values the Premier League power at about $5.3 billion. Among other uses, the capital reportedly will pay down debt and cover construction and infrastructure costs. It is the first investment for Dynasty, the new sports investment fund started by Jonathan Nelson and Don Cornwell.
The XFL and USFL officially announced their intent to merge, news that had been reported by Axios a week ago as having reached advanced stages. The agreement is being hailed as a joining of equals, and makes a world of sense given the challenge professional spring football has had in gaining traction for decades. After all, the XFL and USFL themselves are living proof. This is the second USFL and the third XFL, not to mention the Alliance of American Football, and even the Professional Spring Football League, which folded before a single game in the early 1990s. But the reborn XFL and USFL have found early traction and will only be stronger together.
That's all for this Friday morning. Enjoy the weekend, and we'll see you in October.