Can TikTok save baseball?

As the new Major League Baseball season kicks off, baseball feels more relevant than it has in years. The culture is louder, new rules have made the game faster, and the clips? They’re going viral. Against all odds, short-form social media content might just be giving baseball the ease of access it's been needing for a while now.

Once the uncontested king of American sports, baseball has spent the last few decades grappling with the flashier, faster-moving worlds of basketball and football. With its slow pace, long stretches of idle time, and an absolutely bonkers 2,430 games played every season, baseball doesn’t exactly make it easy for the average viewer to casually tune in. It’s not just a sport — it’s a commitment.

But baseball’s charm has always been in its simplicity: a pitcher, a batter, a field full of players waiting for something to happen. That elegant structure made it perfect for the early 20th century — easy to follow on the radio and scan in a newspaper box score.

On TV, though, that simplicity didn’t exactly translate. As Bailey of the YouTube channel Foolish Baseball argues in his video "Widescreen Ruined Baseball," television elevated the drama in other sports — but for baseball, it only highlighted the downtime.

"To a non-fan, baseball comes across as a slow-paced sport where little of consequence happens for large portions of the game," Bailey said in an email to Mashable. "But when the action gets going, it really gets going. And short content on TikTok captures those thrilling moments for non-fans."

Vertical video brings baseball action into focus

Strangely enough, baseball might be the sport best built for vertical screens. The one-on-one drama between pitcher and batter already unfolds in a tight, centered frame — no need for sweeping pans or chaotic wide shots like in football or soccer. The action happens in bursts, perfectly snackable, and the quiet tension before a pitch plays surprisingly well on a phone screen. It’s cinematic in its own way — less Marvel movie, more A24 slow burn.

It's working, too. According to MLB stats, social engagement during the 2024 World Series surged — with TikTok alone pulling in 6.6 million engagements, a 136% jump from 2023, and over 72 million views (+36%). Since launching its account in 2019, MLB has grown to 7.9 million followers on the platform. For comparison, on X, the MLB gained 7 million of its 12.3 million followers in only the last ten years.

The Show's numbers are nowhere near those of the NFL (17.9M) or the NBA (24.9M), but it's a growing game again, and the numbers prove that.

None of this is to say that watching baseball — or any sport, really — in a vertical format is actually good. But we’re deep in the era where short-form video is king and attention spans are measured in seconds, not innings. For creators like Bailey and MLB itself, the hope is that these bite-sized, second-screen dopamine hits might eventually lead casual viewers back to the long-form game — or at least keep them from scrolling past it entirely.

"Even if only 1% of people who enjoyed a short video convert to regularly watching full broadcasts and attending games, the other 99% are still part of the ecosystem," Bailey said. "For the majority of viewers, it's just a few fleeting seconds of hype and then scrolling to the next thing, but that's still better than if they were never exposed to baseball at all."