MLB's Metaverse

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Introduction 🔌🔧

Another week of headlines dominated by institutional and regulatory matters in crypto.

Whether it’s Larry Fink coming out to signal BlackRock are serious about digital assets, or the SEC losing in court (to some extent) versus Ripple — it feels like muddy waters are getting clearer.

While these are all largely ‘boring’ to most of us in sports or entertainment, they’re incredibly important. Institutional legitimacy and regulatory clarity allow for brands to play in this space in a much safer way.

🔌We’re excited to announce a special event in NYC on the 25th of July 2023. We are now able to open up access to our community to attend and for sponsorship opportunities. It’s a private event, with leaders from Sorare, Dapper, NBA, Karate Combat, Krause House, AWS, Rockstar Games, Apple, Candy Digital, and Redbeard Ventures! Reply to this email if you’re interested in exclusive partnership opportunities or attending, or go to our events website.

MLB’s Metaverse

The Sporting Crypto Newsletter is supported by The HBAR Foundation.

According to a survey in 2017 by Sports Business Journal, the average age of Major League Baseball (MLB) fans is 57.

That’s higher than the average ages of NBA, NHL, and NFL fans, clocking in at 42, 49, and 50, respectively

There has been a concerted effort by MLB to push that average age down, and it’s coming from all angles.

Including, the actual game rules.

MLB's new pitch clock is a rule implemented in the 2023 season to address pace-of-play issues and shorten game times. The pitch clock gives pitchers 15 seconds to deliver a pitch with the bases empty and 20 seconds with a runner on base. If you don’t know the rules of baseball or don’t follow the sport that intently, don’t worry. All you need to know is that this has resulted in an average of 25-31 minutes being trimmed per game. The average time per game has been reduced from 3h 6 mins - 3h 11 mins between 2019-2022 to 2h 39 mins in 2023.

This has seen an increase overall in viewership compared to previous years, across ESPN’s telecasts and MLB TV, and they have also said that the median age of ticket buyers has dropped from 49 in 2019 to 43 in 2023.

Whenever I speak to rights holders about Web3, some of the questions begin with:“Our audience is quite old, and we need to reduce the average age of our fans before we think of engaging them in this way”

Whilst somewhat true, maybe using Web3 is a part of that strategy, rather than something you think about after you get a younger audience could make a lot of sense!

In this newsletter, I discuss:

⚾ MLB’s Web3 journey so far⭐ All-Star activations ❓ What comes next?

⚾ MLB’s Web3 journey so far

MLB have, like most major sports leagues, dabbled in Web3.

When it comes to sponsorships, there was of course the FTX sponsorship which was going well up until the crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy. This was actually the first-ever league-wide crypto sponsorship of a professional sports league, and it ended up pretty much as badly as it could have done.

There’s also the collectable licensing deal that was signed with Candy Digital and an exclusive Web3 fantasy gaming partnership signed with Sorare — which covers most bases.

Here is a quick recap, chronologically of some major MLB Web3 moves since 2018:

1. August, 2018: MLB Crypto Baseball, a licensed MLB game on the Ethereum blockchain

2. March 4, 2019: MLB Crypto Baseball gets listed on NonFungible.com

3. March 13, 2019: The highest-ever MLB Champions NFT sale occurs, selling for 12.5 ETH (equivalent to $1,661 at the time)

4. June 23, 2021: FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, announces a long-term, global partnership with MLB

5. August 5th, 2021: Candy Digital and MLB partner, first involving the creation of exclusive packs of NFTs throughout the season to celebrate individual players, top plays, and historic moments.

6. May 12, 2022: Web3 fantasy sports platform Sorare partners with MLB to create an NFT-based fantasy game around baseball

7. October 27, 2022: MLB generates an estimated $1.19 billion in 2022 sponsorship revenue, with $22 million in deals involving crypto partnerships with MLB, the New York Mets, the Texas Rangers, and the Washington Nationals

8. November, 2022: MLB cut ties with FTX after the crypto exchange’s collapse

The sponsorships and partnerships so far have been a mixed bag.

On the sponsorship side of things, the collapse of FTX probably hurt MLB more than any other sports league in the US. The size of the deal was unknown, but knowing that Capital One became the league’s banking partner on a $125m 5-year deal, FTX would have had to cut a substantial cheque.

Before this, Terra LUNA, a crypto project that began sponsoring MLB team Washington Nationals on a $40 million, five-year deal in February 2022. 

Terra LUNA imploded just months later in May 2022, and the nationals cut ties.

With Sorare, their Web3 fantasy partner - the MLB proposition started off slow compared to the soccer and NBA counterparts.

Their common game (free-to-play) has seen a ~100% increase in entries since the start of their partnership, however.

There’s also slow and steady improvement in most of their paid competitions as well.

When it comes to digital collectibles though, the numbers aren’t as good.

In Jan 2022, MLB NFTs on Candy Digital clocked in $2.7m worth of sales and $1m worth of trading volume.

Compare that to July 2023, 18 months later, where there have been $100k of sales on the platform in its totality. A portion of that $100k can be attributed to MLB sales… so it’s safe to say there’s been a massive drop in demand. Perhaps in isolation, this isn’t terrible per se, but in comparison, it is a steep, steep drop-off.

⭐ All-Star activations

Seemingly, MLB decided to take everything they've done in Web3 up until this point and bring it together during their All-Star week… in the Metaverse.

Yes, that’s right, I used the M-word.

The league debuted a virtual ballpark, created by virtual world and tech creators Improbable. Improbable are most well known in the Web3 space for their work with Bored Ape Yacht Club creators Yuga Labs around their Otherside Metaverse gaming project.

The league’s inaugural virtual event featured a live stream on the ballpark’s video board, exclusive celebrity interviews, and the opportunity to participate in mini-games linked to real-time events at T-Mobile Park in Seattle. 

Visitors were able to customise their avatars with their favourite team’s jersey, participate in trivia games and participate in a Sorare card scavenger hunt. The first 250 people who won, got themselves a card.

Fans were also entered into a draw to win tickets for the 2023 World Series.

In terms of collectibles for the All-Star week, MLB also announced their partnership with Candy Digital extending to a third consecutive year, offering player-focused digital collectibles called “ICONs” and continuing to issue NFT commemorative tickets in the 2023 season. 

Fans redeemed nearly 200,000 collectible tickets last year, according to Candy.

They kicked off their latest partnership at the All-Star week, by allowing all fans attending the game being given the ability to claim an exclusive and limited edition commemorative ticket sponsored by Mastercard for free at Candy.com.

On the sponsor side, the MLB virtual ballpark was presented by Corona, showcasing how we might see digital sponsorship inventory come to the fore more so in the future.

Metaverse ‘stuff’ has taken a lot of heat in the past year. Whether it’s Zuck’s lower fidelity virtual worlds that are being created by Oculus, or decentralised metaverses like Decentraland haemorrhaging active users— it’s been a tough 18 months for those who work in and around the buzzword.

But Improbable are probably the best in class when it comes to creating virtual worlds, and what they’ve created for MLB is high fidelity enough to get people interested. The virtual environment was browser powered and easy to navigate even for gaming novices. And it looks like it had quite a bit of uptake, also.

To summarise so far:

• Candy Digital and MLB announced they were partnering for the 3rd successive year.

• This was kicked off at this year’s MLB All-Star week.

• MLB also launched a virtual world called their virtual ballpark, and activated with their partners Candy Digital, Sorare, Mastercard and also the virtual world sponsors Corona.

• The virtual world was created by Improbable. Browser powered and high fidelity, but with a low barrier to entry.

• Users could watch All-Star streams within the virtual environment, talk to friends, complete challenges and scavenger hunts. 

🧠❓ Thoughts and what comes next?

Since Apple launched Vision Pro — the Metaverse, or ‘spatial computing’ has been deemed cool again. And it looks like, from the content I’ve seen, the virtual ballpark was a fairly successful activation by MLB.

Kenny Gersh, MLB VP, Media and Biz dev was quoted saying:

And whilst this isn’t a plug-and-play, and truly immersive, it at least showcases what could happen in the future.

To me, MLB have struck the balance of not being too early and utilising tech that their fans will actually enjoy enough to use in the here and now, can satisfy sponsors and bring together their ‘digital’ partners — but early enough that they can sell what the future version of fan engagement and broadcasting could look like internally and externally.

The league confirmed this is not the only opportunity where fans will be able to enjoy the experience this season, so we’ll no doubt get to see it again. Whether it has staying power when there’s less novelty is another question.

The rule change mentioned in the introduction that has shortened gameplay and viewer experience is not the only place that MLB are innovating. They’ve also made improvements to the official MLB app and MLB.TV has new design work with statistical overlays to create a better viewing experience. So there’s clearly been a shift in mindset from the league to level up digitally and go after a younger demographic on and off the field.

The thing I like most about this though, is MLB aggregating all their partners into one singular event or activation.

One of the big issues that sports organisations, leagues and teams have had is creating a disparate range of digital products in Web3; be it NFTs, games, fantasy products or tokens — but having no central point to interact with everything. Whilst this isn’t the holy grail answer, MLB have at least created something that aggregates:

1. Their digital collectable partners (Candy Digital)

2. Their fantasy NFT partners (Sorare)

3. Their ‘Metaverse vendors’ (Improbable) 

Alongside this, they’ve engaged their traditional sponsors and partners in Mastercard and Corona in a digitally native way.

If you do something like this right, it can be a goldmine from a sponsorship inventory perspective.

Most rights holders have so far looked to just dangle IP, and find the highest bidder - but now that ship has sailed, they have to be more creative.

Immersive experiences that drive actual engagement are a good first step.

I’m curious to see if more will follow in this domain following the success of the virtual ballpark activation, and I’m also interested in seeing just how much traction it gets beyond the All-Star week.

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More Sports & Web3 Stories

• Get Protocol Raise $4.5 Million to Take on Ticketmaster With NFT Tickets(Read more here)

• Dapper Labs makes 3rd round of cuts in 9 months amid NFT slump (Read more here)

• Virtual Pro Sports SimWin Sports League Partners With Immutable, Aims For 'Mass Adoption Of Web3 Gaming' (Read more here)

• OneFootball shutters Serie A web3 video offering (Read more here)

• Binance renew shirt sponsor deal with FC Rapid (Read more here)

• GameOn Partners With Professional Fighters League (PFL) to Launch Next-Gen Fantasy Games (Read more here)

• Futureverse launches AI League smart soccer game on iOS (Read more here)

• SI Tickets partners with Panini America for NFT rookie trading cards of top youth football players (Read more here)

• The Rise of Crypto Sponsorships: Exploring the Latest Trends (Read more here) 

• Infosys and ITHF Launch Metaverse Tennis Museum (Read more here)

General ‘Stuff’ that Could Impact You

• BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink flips bullish on crypto (Read more here)

• The Ripple vs. SEC Aftermath: What to expect after Court’s ruling XRP is not a security (Read more here)

• Google Play changes policy toward blockchain-based apps, opening door to tokenized digital assets, NFTs (Read more here)

• Europe’s first bitcoin ETF set to launch after 12-month delay (Read more here)

• Louis Vitton and Pharrell collaborate to create an exclusive digital collectible (Read more here)

• Sound XYZ have raised $20m (Read more here)

• Coinbase Wallet launches messaging feature so users can interact directly on its platform (Read more here)

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