Getty MLB made $11.6 billion in revenue last season, a new record for the league.
Business is booming for Major League Baseball. The league made a record $11.6 billion in revenue last season, an industry source confirmed to Heavy, surpassing the $10.8 billion in revenue the league made in 2022, according to Forbes.
Joe Pompliano of the Huddle Up newsletter first reported MLB’s record 2023 revenue in his January 15 column on Substack. He added that the $11.6 billion total includes a record $3.8 billion in ticket revenue, a 15% increase from the 2022 season, as well as record figures in sponsorship, media and merchandise sales.
“The sport is far from dying,” the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand wrote in November 2023, arguing “if anything, [it] is on the way up.
“The reason the sky is not falling is because there is always a focus on what baseball doesn’t do well as opposed to what it does well,” Marchand wrote. “It has a huge audience and soaks up a lot of time from its viewers. It is well-positioned for the future because of that.”
MLB’s prior season revenue record came when it made between $10.8-$10.9 billion in the 2022 season, according to Forbes. In 2019, the last full season before the COVID-19 pandemic, MLB amassed $10.7 billion in revenue.
MLB’s 30 teams welcomed 70,747,365 fans into their ballparks in 2023 season, marking the first season since 2018 that the league attendance reached 70 million. The 2023 attendance total is slightly more than the pre-pandemic 2019 (68.5 million fans) and 2018 (69.6 million) seasons but is lower than annual attendance for each season from 2004 through 2017.
The most fans to attend MLB games in a single season came in 2007 with 79.4 million fans. In 2007, the average MLB game time lasted 2 hours and 55 minutes. MLB’s second-highest fan attendance total came in 2008 when 78.6 million fans came to watch games.
MLB Benefiting From Rule Changes, Shorter Games
The 2023 season was MLB’s first to include a variety of rule changes: a pitch clock, larger bases, limited pick-offs and banning defensive shifts. The rule changes were all aimed at speeding up pace of play and creating more offense — and they seem to have done exactly that.
“We’ve experienced a full year of it now. So let’s just say this: These were the most important rule changes of modern times, possibly in any sport,” The Athletic’s Jayson Stark wrote in November 2023. “Baseball did something. And one year in, it’s astounding to look back at how well it all worked.”
The average nine-inning MLB game time in 2023 was 2 hours and 39 minutes, which is 24 minutes shorter than 2022’s average game time. Finishing games in under three hours was a key goal for MLB, and the 2023 season achieved the goal while having the league’s shortest average game time since 1984. MLB had just nine games reach 3 ½ hours in 2023, which is drastically less than the 390 games that reached that time threshold in 2021.
More rule changes intended to keep game times down are coming in 2024. The pitch clock with runners on base is decreasing to 18 seconds after being 20 seconds last season. Allowed team mound visits will be reduced from five to four, though an extra mound visit will still be awarded for the ninth inning if the defensive team has zero remaining visits at the end of the eighth.
The league-wide average for runs per game increased from 8.6 in 2022 to 9.2 in 2023. Stolen bases per game increased from 1.0 to 1.4 in the league’s first season with bigger bases.
Historic Contracts Follow Record Revenue Figure
This MLB offseason saw the Los Angeles Dodgers sign two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani to an unprecedented 10-year, $700 million contract as the largest athlete salary in sports history.
Fellow Japanese star Yoshinobu Yamamoto signed a 12-year, $325 million contract with the Dodgers, becoming the highest-paid pitcher in MLB history. Arbitration-eligible outfielder Juan Soto also set an MLB record this offseason when he agreed to receive $31 million from the New York Yankees for the 2024 season, the most ever for an MLB player facing arbitration.