The Fan Cave Thrives…

With its seemingly endless season, its three plus hour games and its sometimes strange rules and never ending parade of stats, baseball has long been a punching bag for the fast and loose generation. While other sports like cricket and even football have sought to find ways to speed up the game, baseball’s traditions take precedent and the season goes on at its own pace. It is certainly a challenge for the powers that be to find ways to effectively engage a get it done yesterday generation.

Yet for the shots it takes, there is probably no game still more ingrained in Americana than baseball. Its traditions fit the fabric of spring and summer like few other elements of Americana, and no other sport anywhere in the world can find ways to engage the casual and ardent follower or a night, a week or a year. It is perhaps the most ethnically diverse sport in the world, and has pioneered, ironically, many of the platforms for engagement in the gaming world that others use today. The length of the season is sometimes a liability, but it can also be an asset as a way to continually find ways for businesses to drive revenue and for fans to enjoy the pastime, whether it is on the Major or Minor League level. Still with the positives, the game remains challenged to find more inroads into pop culture to capture a young fan who understands and has played the game but may stray to other areas after adolescence and until he or she reaches a slightly older age.

Enter the Fan Cave season 2. Back and better than ever.

Last year MLB launched a new initiative designed to enter popular culture and social media at another level. The cave, a storefront in lower Manhattan, was be a window to the world of baseball, where two applicants, Mike O’Hara and Ryan Wagner, from over 10,000 were chosen to not just use gadgets and gizmos to watch every baseball game during the season, but to also find ways to interact with a generation into hip and cool but not always into hits and runs. It was a great litmus test for technology involving the fan, from new games to the latest statistical app. to see what may have staying power and what will be more ho hum, all through the glass of a former Tower Records store on Broadway. Characters came by, celebrities and those in town from the sports and music world will dropped in, visited, exposed their latest ideas and tried to help make the Fan Cave become a key destination in the social media world. Mike D. dropped by, players on their day off were hustled in, and little by little the idea started to take hold.

At first glance purists grimaced, but the Fan Cave was not for them. Sabermatricians need not apply, but were welcomed anyway. It started to become an accepted bridge for some generations to experience an aspect of baseball as popular culture between Little League and parenthood, when the value of the game really takes hold again. The Fan Cave was part reality show culture with lots of cross promotion, but without lots of the edge.

Did it work? Yes. This year’s newly tricked out Fan Cave has more gadgets and more cross promotion (it even had a Scott’s Lawn on Opening Day, along with a Bernie Williams visit) than season one. It’s new inhabitants came from a pool of 50,000, and more and more public events will be involved this year, incorporating movies and music, to get foot traffic in the door and followers online. Baseball still has scores of content to talk about and that is still the core, but in the end The Fan Cave (naming rights deal coming soon?) as a social media experiment survived and thrived as the season went along, and is now set up for the sincerest form of flattery, similar experiments from other sports leagues in and around the world.

A solid MLB experiment done well.