MLB Redesigns The Baseball Experience. And It's A Game Changer.

This isn't an article about baseball. It's a case study about #ExperienceDesign, and a change that may have reinvigorated the future for #MajorLeagueBaseball (#MLB).

I'm a huge baseball fan. I was a player, coach, umpire, and even the commissioner of a little league. And growing up in New England, I am a lifelong member of #RedSox Nation. I love spending an afternoon or evening at #FenwayPark, or really, at any baseball park. But I'm a dwindling cohort of fans who wants to spend 2.5 to 4 hours watching a baseball game, especially during a regular season that spans 162 games.

I recently watched the Red Sox play the Astros in a spring training game, and was amazed at how a new rule has transformed the game. It's a pitch clock that requires the pitcher to throw the ball within a certain amount of time (between 15 and 30 seconds depending on the situation) and the batter must be ready to hit with 8 seconds left on the pitch clock.

MLB has been trying to speed up the game for a while with different rules changes, but this is the first truly transformative change that I've seen. It turns baseball into a continuous action sport. Let me explain a bit.

If you've ever attended a baseball game (and I'm guessing that many of you have not), then you know that the actual game itself takes up very little time. As a matter of fact, one analysis found that a baseball game has 18 minutes of action. That's less than 10% of the time that people spend in their seats. There's a ton of time in between pitches. So attending a baseball game turns out to be more about talking to the people around you and looking at your phone than actually watching a game.

The game itself has a lot more downtime than all of the other major U.S. professional sports. While football, hockey, basketball, and soccer (futbol) all have extended gaps for time outs and period changes, they compel attendees to pay attention when the game is in play. It's non-stop action, going from play to play.

The pitch count changes that dynamic for baseball. I was compelled to watch the entire game as it was happening. There wasn't enough time in between pitches for my mind to wander. It was a totally different, and better, experience.

And the pitch count changes another problem with baseball... the length of the game. It is both long (averaging over three hours) and highly variable (a typical game can run between 2 and 4 hours, or even longer). So far, it looks like the average MLB game with the pitch count is running a little longer than 2.5 hours, with a lot less variance.

This one rule changes what I think were two of baseball's most broken experiences... slow, episodic pace of play and long, undependable game times.

If this change works and it increases the fanbase for MLB, then it would have done so without changing any of the fundamental elements of the baseball game. It didn't shift to from nine to seven inning games or from three to two out innings. It just put in place a rule that will change behaviors inside of the game.

This rule change isn't for everyone. My father-in-law, an avid and even longer tenured Red Sox fan, didn't like it. He liked the old pace of play and didn't enjoy seeing a batter being called out on strikes after taking too much time to get ready for the pitch.

There's a very important lesson here that I've used to help many companies: Design for the customers you want, not for the ones that you have. Sometimes they're the same, but often times they're not. If MLB had kept designing around it's most avid fans, then it would continue to see it's viewership slip. So it focused on designing for a younger generation of potential fans who are not interested in participating in any slow-pace events that have no dependable ending time. You need to think about the customers you want to be serving in the future, and not just about the customers who love you today.

This is a discipline that most companies lack. For instance, have you identified your target customer segments for the future? Do you have personas to design for those future customers? Do you focus your research or amplify the feedback from those cohorts? Do you prioritize your investments to meet their needs?

I'm not sure if this change will create a whole new generation of MLB fans, but I'm pretty certain that it's dramatically improved the odds of that happening.

I'm looking forward to seeing my Red Sox win a lot of 2.5 hour games!