Major League Baseball is looking for a new kind of fan

On October 2nd, fair as Major League Baseball’s Division Series was kicking off, the chief MLB Instagram and TikTok accounts posted a video hyping up the teams motionless in the operating for the World Series. It featured clips of players from the Milwaukee Brewers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, and additional sliding into residence plate, hitting homers, and celebrating hits — norm diet for a emphasize reel. What really makes the montage, though, is that it’s set to an Olivia Rodrigo song.

The song, “My Way,” is an gathering track — not equal a sole — from Rodrigo’s latest record. It’s not exactly the soundtrack one power anticipate from an MLB-produced video. (“And current is the part anywhere the female gets pissed / And the female is me, did you get that hint?” she sings.) But as evidenced by the comments, it hit exactly the correct people: “I see I’m part of a extremely niche part of MLB fans,” one individual said. “Target spectators reached,” another responded. The clip has complete 2.1 myriad views on Instagram and 615,000 views on TikTok.

“One of our favorite things is whenever a community says, ‘Oh, MLB knows ball,’ or, ‘Oh, I can’t accept my interests [are] converging,’” says Cameron Gidari, MLB’s vice chairman of social media and innovation. The social squad is a fan of Rodrigo’s to commencement alongside and loves the song, Gidari says, “but afterward additionally we idea we could create a really engaging edit alongside it, and we idea that community would value being seen.”

Acknowledging the blend of baseball–Olivia Rodrigo fans is smart. It additionally power be essential for the endurance of the sport. People affection baseball, of course, but it frequently feels akin it’s trailing another sports, not fair in viewership but additionally culturally. Baseball is famously stats dense — there are thousands of games all period throughout the league, and teams perform nearly all day. What happens on the site today is frequently contextualized through what happened in games in the past, making it difficult to jump in without a former of observing (or learning about) the sport. Go rear a few years, and you’d discover MLB social channels were additional “editorially focused,” Gidari says, focusing on facts of the equivalent or highlights. Speaking to fans who have another interests — or who are merely additional informal — has been a deliberate choice, he says.

“Our spirit general on social is the spirit of fandom,” Giardi says. “We think there is item really inviting and magnetic concerning that, and it was a conscious shift.”

Here’s a article of Dua Lipa and Callum Turner at a Yankees game, the night the squad was eliminated from the postseason. Here’s an edit spliced together alongside shots of athletes looking shocked and in awe, as if they were reacting to a opus by the K-pop collection Stray Kids. Here’s a emphasize reel of White Sox archetypal baseman Munetaka Murakami being funny.

The nature of social media algorithms all but requires MLB to branch out. Recommendation-based social feeds average that following an document doesn’t necessarily average followers volition see the satisfied — feeds have rotate into reorganized into satisfied niches, topics, and trends, and Gidari says “really assured algorithm changes” meant the association had to rethink what it posts. Content from the MLB in English- and Spanish-language social accounts racked up 19.1 milliard views during the 2026 regular season, Gidari says, a record.

A important part of that change has been MLB’s clasp of influencers and satisfied creators. So far this year, the association has tapped 400 creators who posted a blended 3,800 pieces of content, and in the postseason, MLB has had satisfied creators at all sole game. The association expects to have 100 satisfied creators at the World Series, depending on how many games it runs.

The openness and collaboration alongside satisfied creators is comparatively new for MLB. As lately as 2024, satisfied creators (including Jimmy “Jomboy” O’Brien, who does viral lip-reading breakdowns) complained of getting wide-ranging copyright takedowns on their content. In 2025, Commissioner Rob Manfred acknowledged the association fumbled this piece of the fanbase and that changing its tune had been “a really fine thing” for MLB. (The association equal acquired a stake in O’Brien’s media business final year.) More recently, a TikTok alliance gave choose creators admission to the league’s archives to use in their content.

For the archetypal time, MLB has expanded beyond having influencers lone at big events. The association now brings satisfied creators to regular period games, too, and has broadened its attain to contain additional than fair ballgame and sports creators. Rachel Richter, director of influencer strategy, says MLB plant alongside food, fashion, lifestyle, gaming, and family influencers, too.

“There are informal fans or [people] that aren’t equal fans yet, that perchance they’re going to go to a equivalent fair since they get to put on a adorable outfit, or they desire to try this new food item,” Richter says. The idea is to get those creators to a equivalent and let them merge ballgame into their customary content.

The association is construction on momentum, particularly coming off a prosperous season final year: Game 7 of the 2025 World Series between the Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays was the most-watched World Series equivalent since 2017, and additional global viewers watched final year’s matchup than always before. But as another sports have found, it can be a learning curve to balance longtime fans and the civilization of the athletics alongside an insurgent, at times unpredictable, category of promotional power brokers: The biggest narrative out of this year’s US Open, for example, was not the tennis itself but the many complaints and debates concerning the influencers who attended.

MLB is operating to develop what constitutes a fan, reaching into corners of the net and civilization that earlier were ignored or, at the extremely least, untapped. At the identical time, it’s hurtling toward an uncertain 2027 period as the company bargaining accord between squad owners and the MLB Players Association is set to expire in December. If the union and owners don’t attain a agreement in time, players apt would be locked out, and the 2027 period could be shortened. Messaging that battle would be a difficulty in itself for the association — particularly following adopting the sound of new, casual, and enthusiastic fans who are looking for a logic to tune in.