Between overlapping international soccer tournaments, the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, and the US Open Tennis Championships, sports fans would be forgiven for expecting youth baseball to fly under the radar this summer.
To the contrary, the Little League World Series Championship Game, which aired on ABC the day before the first round of the US Open began, was the most-watched of its kind in almost a decade, according to ESPN.
The series was front and center on ESPN platforms, and in addition to mainstream network viewership, Little League boasts a media landscape and major brand sponsors like Gatorade, Adidas, and T-Mobile, painting a picture of an industry whose viewership and sponsorship interest looks increasingly similar to the big leagues.
Ballpark figures
Little League games have appeared on Disney-owned channels like ABC and ESPN since the early 1960s, according to Liz DiLullo Brown, Little League’s EVP and chief marketing and business relationship officer. “It’s one of our longest-standing partnerships,” Deidra Maddock, VP of sports brand solutions at Disney Advertising, told Marketing Brew.
It’s not just out of respect for tradition that the networks keep airing games: This year’s Little League Baseball World Series Championship Game averaged 3,535,000 viewers on ABC, up 20% year over year and delivering the highest viewership since 2015, according to ESPN. Excluding the MLB postseason, MLB All-Star events, and World Baseball Classic games, it was also the most-watched baseball game at any level on any network since the 2021 Field of Dreams game, per ESPN.
Softball, too, has seen growth in participation in recent years and viewership has followed. The 2024 Little League Softball World Series championship game, which overlapped with the Olympics, was the fifth most-watched Little League softball game on record. In 2023, Little League softball games averaged 340,000 viewers across ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2; that championship game on ABC was the most-watched Little League softball game on record, with 861,000 viewers, according to ESPN.
Naturally, some of those viewers are parents and families of the kids who participate, but “we wouldn’t get to 3+ million for those championships” without interest from other demographics, Maddock said. The audience for Little League tends to skew toward millennial and Gen X parents, though there’s also an increase in co-viewing among families, as well as a growing younger audience watching highlights on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, Brown said.
All the bases
In addition to network coverage, which Maddock said includes “a lot of the same ‘game around the game’ treatment that we do for professional sports and for college sports,” social media has helped elevate youth baseball even further, according to Han Oh, CMO of baseball scouting organization Perfect Game.
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“Some of these kids have their own social media followings at 16 or 17, with tens of thousands of followers,” he said. “It’s a fragmented media space, but somehow these kids have really figured out ways to connect it all.”
Perfect Game has a streaming service of its own, PGTV, that debuted during the pandemic with a few cameras at one facility, CEO Rob Ponger said. Now, “there’s almost a camera on every single field that we’re on,” he said. Having a media presence that includes social media and the streaming service has helped Perfect Game attract sponsors outside of traditional sports apparel and equipment companies, he said, including Yeti and UBS.
Big-league brands
There are also brands that come to Little League through Major League Baseball, which assists in “the sponsorship acquisition process” for Little League baseball and softball, Brown said. For sponsors, adding Little League to the mix is often aimed at “reaching this young audience, and this really engaged audience,” she said.
Little League sells its baseball and softball sponsorships as a package deal, Brown said, and across the more than a dozen brands that sponsor Disney’s Little League content, almost all of them, including Dick’s Sporting Goods, PNC Bank, and Uncrustables, engaged with both sports this year, Maddock said—mirroring the increase of brand dollars that pro women’s sports have seen in recent years.
“Gone are the days when people were saying, ‘I only want to activate in baseball,’” Maddock said. “Brands are being very intentional about making sure that they are in both the baseball and softball space.”