Damaso Garcia and "The Long Tail"

MLB has done something good for itself and baseball fans. The league is leveraging old content (that used to just lie there being unprofitable) to create a new revenue stream.

Fans can download some classic games through the creatively titled Digital Download Service. Great idea. The league gets revenue for content that was just sitting around. Fans can get through the off-season watching classic games.

But why is MLB doing this half-assed?

For example, I want to buy a game between the Tigers and Blue Jays from June, 1985. Damaso Garcia took Jack Morris deep on the first pitch. Tigers lost, 6-5.

That was the first game I saw in person. I’ll never forget it. And I want to watch it again.

That game is part of the “long tail” of baseball content.

The long tail is a statistical distribution feature.

Here is what Wikipedia says about the Long Tail and catering to increasingly fragmented audiences (i.e., people who want to buy a Tigs-Jays game from 1985):

Where the opportunity cost of inventory storage and distribution is high, only the most popular products are sold. But where the Long Tail kicks in, minority tastes are catered to and individuals are offered greater choice. In situations where popularity is determined by the lowest common denominator, the Long Tail will thus lead to improvement in a society's level of culture. TV is a good example of this: TV stations have limited time slots, so the opportunity cost of each time slot is high; stations therefore choose programs that have the broadest appeal. But as the number of TV stations grows or TV programming is distributed through other digital channels, the choice of TV programs grows and the cultural level rises.

Cliff’s Notes: Wiki uses a TV example, but I'm trying to say that the Internet makes it cheap and profitable to offer content that not many people want (niche content). The economic incentive to cater to the masses is evaporating.

Right now, MLB just caters to the masses with classic games. That’s a start. But the league needs to reap the rewards of the long tail. MLB needs to aggressively, radically expand the number of games available for purchase. Individual fans will buy obscure stuff, because it’s not obscure to them.