What students' fandom, union sentiment suggests about 2022 MLB lockout news coverage

In December 2021, Major League Baseball owners unanimously voted to begin a lockout. They had failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement with the Major League Baseball Players Association before the previous agreement expired. It was the first MLB work stoppage since the 1994–1995 strike, which resulted in the World Series ‘ cancelation.

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred during a news conference in Arlington, Texas, in early December 2021. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

The spring 2022 semester at Arizona State University began shortly thereafter. Three Barrett Honor’s College students approached me about undertaking Honors Enrichment Contracts: Talia Massi in my in-person JMC 367: Ethics and Diversity in Sports Journalism class, and Andrew Jordan and Ashley Greer in my online MCO 465: Sports and Media class. Enrichment contracts allow students to earn honors credits in non-honors courses by undertaking supplemental work. The instructor and student determine what the work is, so contracts can vary widely from class to class. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, I ceased doing individual contracts, and instead, created one big research project for all interested Honors students to collaborate on with me during the semester.

Little did I realize when I met with Massi, Jordan, and Greer via Zoom in early 2022 that the research we would undertake would go on to receive the top extended abstract award at the 2024 Cronkite Research Symposium and would be published in the International Journal of Sport Communication as of last month.

When we began brainstorming research ideas, the three of them were following news coverage of the MLB lockout – one student in particular noting lopsided news coverage. Why did some sports journalists seem unapologetically biased in their reporting?

Our project began with me combing past research on news coverage of labor-management relations in the United States. I learned that, generally speaking, sports journalists are historically hostile to work stoppages. Their incentives for wanting “the show to go on” stem from media and sport’s historical interdependence. Prior to the Gilded Age, sport was considered “vulgar and disreputable” among the mainstream reading American public. This changed when journalists began writing about then-newly invented organized sports, such as “base ball,” in the mid 19th-century. As Amber Roessner describes in Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and the Sporting Press in America (2014), reporters explained these new games' rules and concepts in their news articles by framing athletes and coaches as metaphors for symbols and values the American reading public already understood. Over time, sport benefited from the fandom and money this coverage generated. News media, in turn, drew advertising dollars and audiences as interest in organized games grew. According to James R. Walker and Robert V. Bellamy Jr. in Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television (2008, p. 26), “Television did not create baseball, but baseball helped to create television.” In fact, rising television revenue was a reason labor negotiations soured in 1994 and the aforementioned World Series was canceled. (For more on this and other mind-blowing facts, see my University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill classmate David Bockino’s Game On: How Sports Media Grew Up, Sold Out & Got Personal with Billions of Fans (2024).)

Agenda-setting theory explains why some issues and story angles, and not others, are available to news consumers, and how consumers’ perception of an issue is shaped by said content. Developed by Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw – also at UNC-Chapel Hill – agenda-setting theory has repeatedly shown that journalists play a pivotal role in shaping public policy because of their ability to identify and to publicize issues. Other studies have confirmed that news coverage of union activity traditionally emphasizes strikes, corruption, and violence – thus, negatively influencing public opinion about unions.

What past studies have not examined, however, was the role sports journalists’ personal union sentiment, baseball enthusiasm, and baseball knowledge had in shaping their perception of work stoppages.

After studying past research, my students and I designed an experiment. We gave 45 sports journalism students a questionnaire that measured their levels of baseball fandom, baseball knowledge, and labor union sentiment. We did this by adapting and combining Izzo et al.’s (2011) measures of sports fandom, Nevett et al.’s (1993) baseball knowledge test, and the Australian Public Opinion Polls’ (2002) trade union sentiment measures into one questionnaire.

After completing the questionnaire, participants read an article that favored either MLB management or players. Lastly, participants completed another questionnaire – this time, with the trade union sentiment measures adapted specifically to the then-current lockout. I used the sports fandom, union sentiment, and baseball knowledge scores (measured before students read the article) in a linear regression to see how these variables could predict whether students sympathized more with management or labor, and if so, to what extent.

Overall, our results showed that the sports journalism students in our sample leaned pro-union. This was unsurprising. The 2021 Gallup poll found that about 68% of Americans approve of labor unions. Students’ fandom, on the other hand, did surprise me.

When measuring professional sports journalists’ fandom in an earlier study, I found that younger, less experienced sports journalists more frequently live vicariously through the teams and athletes they cover, experience sporting events as opportunities for socialization, and appreciate the physical skill of the game more than their veteran counterparts. Like rookie sports journalists, the sports journalism students in our sample also scored highly on these three elements of fandom. However, a fourth element from Izzo et al’s (2011) measures of sports fandom emerged that was not present among professional sports journalists: escapism. In fact, sports journalism students’ escapism and socialization elements merged into one strong, indistinguishable concept.

This fandom was pivotal in statistically predicting whether students sympathized with players or management during the 2022 lockout. The higher students’ pro-union sentiment and levels of escapism/socialization and appreciation for physical skill, the more they sympathized with players. The only significant predictor of a pro-management stance, however, was whether participants were already skeptical of organized labor in the first place.

Another thing that surprised me was how low students’ baseball strategy knowledge was. The average score was 13.29 out of 20 questions. That’s a 65%. Questions’ degree of difficulty ranged from novice (e.g., “The main goal in baseball is (a) to hit a home run, (b) to get on base as many times as one can, (c) to score more runs than the other team, or (d) none of the above”) to sophisticated (e.g., “The game is tied in the bottom of the seventh inning [or last inning], and there are no outs with the bases loaded. How should the infield and outfield be positioned? (a) Infield deep, outfield close; (b) infield in close, outfield deep; (c) infield and outfield close; or (d) infield and outfield deep”). One of the limitations of this study was that I don’t know how many students completing the questionnaire were interested in baseball, let alone aspiring to be baseball reporters. But this score tells me we have an opportunity. For as much as we teach students how to write, report, and create content in journalism programs, we don’t dive into specific sports’ strategies. Historically, sports journalists were likely covering multiple sports, needing to be knowledgeable about current events. But as Simon McEnnis says in Disrupting Sports Journalism (2022, p. 94), post-pandemic sports journalism now faces “a battle for professional survival” as it attempts to distinguish itself from its competitors. Perhaps one way an aspiring sports journalism student could do this is by amping up their raw strategy knowledge. Universities and businesses training sports journalists could, for example, offer supplementary training for interested students, such as rules and scenario add-ons, that could aid in this transformation. 

This project also showed me how beneficial it can be to work with undergraduate students on research. Students’ ideas are fresh and practical. This process also exposes them to research. I went on to present this paper at the Play the Game conference in Trondheim, Norway, in February 2024. This study’s lead author, Massi, went on to create VaNILla, an app for collegiate student athletes and brands to pursue Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals, for her senior Barrett Honor’s project. She won Outstanding Undergraduate Student honors at our spring 2023 commencement. In his senior thesis, Jordan explored MLB's federal anti-trust law exemption, granted in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs (1922), and its ramifications. He now works for the Valley Athletic Booster Club, a booster organization that supports ASU athletics through NIL and fundraising projects. For her senior thesis, Greer co-authored a study with Brooke Underwood that examined how the university’s post-COVID-19 pandemic multi-modal schedules impact students’ preferences, motivations, and learning. Greer now works for Ironwood Lithographers, An RR Donnelley Company that helps businesses streamline their operations and improve customer engagement.

I’m hoping there will be many more studies with such extraordinary students in the future.