Astros 3B Alex Bregman is trying to figure out how to market baseball "via the digitally savvy methods" of basketball and football players, as he "wants nothing less than to captivate a new generation of fans, securing the future of the sport he loves," according to Ben Reiter of SI. Bregman said, “How do we make baseball as marketable as the NBA and NFL? How do we blow this game up and make our stars huge?” Steelers WR JuJu Smith-Schuster, whose YouTube channel has nearly 750,000 subscribers, is a "lot more influential and beloved than most people think." This offseason, Bregman "resolved to become MLB’s answer" to Smith-Schuster. Since Bregman launched his own YouTube channel last fall, he has "posted nearly 80 videos, about four a week." According to athlete marketing platformopendorse, Bregman "earned 4.3 million social engagements between late October and mid-February, nearly 2 1/2 times as many as baseball’s second-most engaging player," Blue Jays P Marcus Stroman. Still, Bregman’s total "would have put him just 18th in the NFL." MLB has "not developed the crossover stars" who "dot rival leagues." Bregman believes that there are a "number of reasons for that failure, among them apathy by both MLB and its players as well as a fear of upsetting the gatekeepers of what remains a culturally hidebound sport" (SI, 3/25 issue).
