Baseball should adopt the Magic Weekend
The national pastime needs to reintroduce itself to the nation
Lets get this out of the way: baseball isn’t dying. The sport maintains decent metrics across the board and is in no danger of disappearing but it’s also not as healthy as it could be and for many Americans the game is out-of-sight and out-of-mind.
Rugby league — which is different from rugby union, or what most of the world simply calls “rugby” — has long faced problems of visibility and suffered from a lack of mainstream attention. This has seen the sport struggle to get a foothold outside of hotbeds in New South Wales, the north of England, Queensland, Papua New Guinea, and pockets in the south of France. In an effort to expanded its base outside of its domestic heartland, the Rugby Football League (of England, and, effectively, Great Britain at-large) settled on the idea of playing an entire round of matches at a single site outside of its domestic heartland. Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium was selected as the location for the first event, thanks in no small part to sponsorship from the Welsh Tourist Board. While the event didn’t manage to fill the massive national stadium the numbers were impressive for club rugby league in the northern hemisphere and the event was judged to be a success.
That was in 2007, and with the obvious exception of 2020, the event has become a staple on the Super League calendar, having since taken place in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, and Liverpool, with an additional stop in Cardiff sprinkled in. While rugby league remains a relatively niche sport in the United Kingdom when compared to soccer, rugby union, or even cricket, the Magic Weekend concept has created an event that grabs public attention in a way that the sport had struggled to before, and gets people talking about rugby league who wouldn’t have prior to the concept’s launch. The event has inspired similar concepts across the globe with Australia’s National Rugby League — probably the sport’s premier club competition — hosting a Magic Round in Brisbane every year (other than that one) since 2019 and the Australian Football League rolling out a similar though distinct concept this year with the “Gather Round” hosted by venues around South Australia. Unlike their rugby league counter-parts the AFL drafted in a handful of smaller stadiums to host matches, creating an event with a real community feel.
Major League Baseball would do well to give the idea a look. Every MLB team plays at least 81 home games per season, and while some certainly draw strong numbers, none of them sell out their ballpark on a nightly basis, and none of them are completely reliant on gate receipts for their survival. Yes, losing a home game is a bad deal for local fans, I’m sympathetic to this argument, but even if one home game is taken away they still have 80 other games they can go to, and this date would be announced well in advance. Hosting games outside of MLB cities would also allow fans who may never otherwise get an opportunity to attend an MLB game a chance to see top baseball in person, possibly for the first time.
So how would it work? First, you’d need to pick a state. The state in question would need to have at least a few parks capable of hosting Major League games, this doesn’t mean full-fledged MLB parks, but parks with professional-level facilities, and while it isn’t a requirement, it would help if the state wasn’t currently home to a Major League club. The AFL’s Gather Round saw nine games hosted by three venues across three days, with the Adelaide Oval hosting the bulk (6 games) of the event. A round of MLB would feature fifteen games, and would almost certainly need more than three venues, even if one signature venue carried most of the load, which it almost certainly would.
So where would it happen? Trying to keep to the idea of hosting the event in a state without a Major League team, and resisting the temptation of using my own state (which is actually well-qualified), I would suggest an unlikely, but very capable, option: Arkansas.
Not only does Arkansas not have a Major League Baseball team, Arkansas doesn’t have any major sports teams, though it does have the University of Arkansas Razorbacks, who are probably more popular than most major teams. The state also hosts an array of fine, if a little small, ballparks, that would look great on television. So we’ll use the Natural State as our example.
A curtain-raiser would take place with a nationally televised game on Friday evening at Dickey-Stephens Park (7,300) in North Little Rock, home of the AA Travelers. Saturday would host seven games across four venues, three within Arkansas itself, and a fourth just across the Mississippi in Memphis. Arvest Ballpark (7,305) in Springdale, home of the AA Naturals; Baum-Walker Stadium (11,531) in Fayetteville, home of the Razorbacks; and Memphis’ AutoZone Park (10,000), home of the AAA Redbirds, would join Dickey-Stephens, with the remaining games played as Sunday double-bills, and finishing up with an end-cap in North Little Rock.
Special attention could be taken to make sure children get a chance to attend games and see Major League games up-close and in-person. There is no guarantee this idea would succeed, and it would certainly cost most teams a night’s worth of stadium revenue, but there is no guarantee that anything is going to succeed, and if it did succeed it would do this one thing that absolutely every sports league is chasing every single day: it would create new fans. It’s worth a shot, there’s no shortage of states that could do it, and almost certainly no shortage of those that would want to do it. Like I said, baseball isn’t dying, and it isn’t going away, but there’s a fair chance that for most Americans, it isn’t in the spotlight either and as our domestic game, it should be.