Major League Baseball is looking for a new kind of fan

On October 2nd, just as Major League Baseball’s Division Series was kicking off, the main MLB Instagram and TikTok accounts posted a video hyping up the teams still in the running for the World Series. It featured clips of players from the Milwaukee Brewers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, and more sliding into home plate, hitting homers, and celebrating hits — standard fare for a highlight reel. What really makes the montage, though, is that it’s set to an Olivia Rodrigo song.

The song, “My Way,” is an album track — not even a single — from Rodrigo’s latest record. It’s not exactly the soundtrack one might expect from an MLB-produced video. (“And here is the part where the girl gets pissed / And the girl is me, did you get that hint?” she sings.) But as evidenced by the comments, it hit exactly the right people: “I see I’m part of a very niche part of MLB fans,” one person said. “Target audience reached,” another responded. The clip has over 2.1 million views on Instagram and 615,000 views on TikTok.

“One of our favorite things is when a community says, ‘Oh, MLB knows ball,’ or, ‘Oh, I can’t believe my interests [are] converging,’” says Cameron Gidari, MLB’s vice president of social media and innovation. The social team is a fan of Rodrigo’s to begin with and loves the song, Gidari says, “but then also we thought we could make a really interesting edit with it, and we thought that community would appreciate being seen.”

Acknowledging the combination of baseball–Olivia Rodrigo fans is smart. It also might be essential for the survival of the sport. People love baseball, of course, but it often feels like it’s trailing other sports, not just in viewership but also culturally. Baseball is famously stats heavy — there are thousands of games every season across the league, and teams play almost every day. What happens on the field today is often contextualized through what happened in games in the past, making it hard to jump in without a history of watching (or learning about) the sport. Go back a few years, and you’d find MLB social channels were more “editorially focused,” Gidari says, focusing on facts of the game or highlights. Speaking to fans who have other interests — or who are simply more casual — has been a deliberate choice, he says.

“Our tone overall on social is the tone of fandom,” Giardi says. “We think there is something really inviting and magnetic about that, and it was a conscious shift.”

Here’s a post of Dua Lipa and Callum Turner at a Yankees game, the night the team was eliminated from the postseason. Here’s an edit spliced together with shots of athletes looking shocked and in awe, as if they were reacting to a song by the K-pop group Stray Kids. Here’s a highlight reel of White Sox first baseman Munetaka Murakami being funny.

The nature of social media algorithms all but requires MLB to branch out. Recommendation-based social feeds mean that following an account doesn’t necessarily mean followers will see the content — feeds have become reorganized into content niches, topics, and trends, and Gidari says “really aggressive algorithm changes” meant the league had to rethink what it posts. Content from the MLB in English- and Spanish-language social accounts racked up 19.1 billion views during the 2026 regular season, Gidari says, a record.

A significant part of that shift has been MLB’s embrace of influencers and content creators. So far this year, the league has tapped 400 creators who posted a combined 3,800 pieces of content, and in the postseason, MLB has had content creators at every single game. The league expects to have 100 content creators at the World Series, depending on how many games it runs.

The openness and collaboration with content creators is relatively new for MLB. As recently as 2024, content creators (including Jimmy “Jomboy” O’Brien, who does viral lip-reading breakdowns) complained of getting wide-ranging copyright takedowns on their content. In 2025, Commissioner Rob Manfred acknowledged the league fumbled this slice of the fanbase and that changing its tune had been “a really good thing” for MLB. (The league even acquired a stake in O’Brien’s media company last year.) More recently, a TikTok partnership gave select creators access to the league’s archives to use in their content.

For the first time, MLB has expanded beyond having influencers only at big events. The league now brings content creators to regular season games, too, and has broadened its reach to include more than just baseball and sports creators. Rachel Richter, director of influencer strategy, says MLB works with food, fashion, lifestyle, gaming, and family influencers, too.

“There are casual fans or [people] that aren’t even fans yet, that maybe they’re going to go to a game just because they get to put on a cute outfit, or they want to try this new food item,” Richter says. The idea is to get those creators to a game and let them incorporate baseball into their usual content.

The league is building on momentum, especially coming off a successful season last year: Game 7 of the 2025 World Series between the Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays was the most-watched World Series game since 2017, and more international viewers watched last year’s matchup than ever before. But as other sports have found, it can be a learning curve to balance longtime fans and the culture of the sport with an insurgent, at times unpredictable, class of promotional power brokers: The biggest story out of this year’s US Open, for example, was not the tennis itself but the many complaints and debates about the influencers who attended.

MLB is working to expand what constitutes a fan, reaching into corners of the internet and culture that previously were ignored or, at the very least, untapped. At the same time, it’s hurtling toward an uncertain 2027 season as the collective bargaining agreement between team owners and the MLB Players Association is set to expire in December. If the union and owners don’t reach a deal in time, players likely would be locked out, and the 2027 season could be shortened. Messaging that conflict would be a challenge in itself for the league — especially after adopting the voice of new, casual, and eager fans who are looking for a reason to tune in.