Future of MLB in Fantastic Hands with Avalanche of Young, Marketable Stars

Just when you thought Major League Baseball couldn't possibly get any younger, it goes and has a season like this. In 2015, talented young players have taken over.

And let there be no mistake about it: This is a good thing.

But before we get to that, let's set the TARDIS for the year 2012.

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That's the year when 20-year-old super-prospect Mike Trout and 19-year-old super-prospect Bryce Harper arrived on the scene in April and went on to win Rookie of the Year awards. Thus began the Trout vs. Harper debate, which still rages.

Also of note in 2012 was 19-year-old super-prospect Manny Machado arriving to help the Baltimore Orioles snap their postseason drought. Meanwhile, 24-year-old Clayton Kershaw won a second straight ERA title, 25-year-old Andrew McCutchen authored his first MVP-caliber season, and 25-year-old Buster Posey won his first MVP and second of three World Series rings.

All told, it was clear then that MLB had a youth movement on its hands. And as Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight.com would note, the trend didn't let up. Paul Goldschmidt, Matt Harvey, Jose Fernandez and other players age 25 and under had a significant hand in the game's overall production in 2013:

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In 2013, about 28 percent of all Wins Above Replacement were created by the under-25 set. That was the ninth-largest share for any season since 1976. Output from youngsters has been on the upswing since the mid-to-late 1990s, when the percentage of WAR from young players hit its nadir.

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After capturing 2013, the youth movement then took 2014. The percentage of the league's total WAR produced by 25-and-under hitters and pitchers only fell to 25.2 percent. Trout who led the charge, and he was joined by Giancarlo Stanton, Yasiel Puig, Anthony Rendon, Anthony Rizzo, Jose Altuve, Chris Sale, Madison Bumgarner, Sonny Gray and others.

This is how the stage was set for 2015. MLB was already sitting on a veritable gold mine of young talent, and it was bound to experience another banner year for young talent no matter what.

Instead, this is shaping up to be a downright historic year for young talent.

Entering Wednesday, 25-and-under hitters and pitchers were accounting for 30.7 percent of the league's total WAR. That's a chunk of production over three decades in the making, as Paine's research shows that 1980 was the last year the 25-and-under crowd waged that much WAR.

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This has much to do with how holdovers from recent seasons are having awesome years. Harper's potential has become reality, and he's now challenging Trout as the game's top superstar. Machado is also emerging as a true superstar. Stanton is on pace for 60 home runs.

The best pitcher in baseball could be Gray (25). Or perhaps Gerrit Cole (24). Or Shelby Miller (24).

But it's not all just because of the holdovers. As Aaron Gleeman of Hardball Talk so accurately put it, 2015 is proving to be "The Year of the Call-Up."

Joc Pederson, Jorge Soler and Daniel Norris are top prospects who began 2015 in the majors, and Kris Bryant, Addison Russell and Carlos Rodon soon joined them. In the weeks since, Blake Swihart, Noah Syndergaard, Joey Gallo, Carlos Correa, Byron Buxton, Francisco Lindor and Kyle Schwarber have joined the parade.

Here's J.J. Cooper of Baseball America to explain what these 13 players have in common:

That's impressive. And of the bunch, Pederson, Bryant, Syndergaard, Gallo and Correa have sent strong signals that they're worthy of their hype. In time, here's guessing they won't be the only ones.

So, that's the state of MLB's youth movement. It began in earnest in 2012, refused to go away in 2013 and 2014 and has reached a peak in 2015. More so than it has been in a long time, baseball is a young man's game.

And for baseball's future, that bodes well.

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If nothing else, baseball's ongoing influx of young talent is an assurance that the quality of play in MLB isn't going to sink like so many stones anytime soon.

As Jeff Zimmerman of FanGraphs discovered in 2013, players' skills haven't been aging quite as well ever since 2006, which not so coincidentally is the same year MLB got serious about performance-enhancing drugs.

That means it's largely up to the youngsters to carry the league's star power. They've obviously been doing that, having effectively buoyed the quality of play.

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They deserve their share of the credit for the high attendance figures MLB has been enjoying lately, not to mention the league's ever-escalating stream of revenue. Certainly, young players are doing their part to ensure baseball doesn't lose fans.

But while that's nice, having so much bright young talent in the game has the potential to serve an even more important function: attract fans the game doesn't already have. 

And yeah, that means the young ones.

It's no secret MLB is struggling with the young demographic, as the data leaves no ifs, ands or buts about it. According to a 2014 article from Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, only 24 percent of MLB's audience in the 2013 season was under 35 years old. That's compared to 37 percent for the NHL, 40 percent for MLS and 45 percent for the NBA.

No need to tell new MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. He's aware of this, which is why he's made attracting more young people to baseball one of his primary goals.

Manfred told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times after he took office in January: 

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The one that I'm most excited about, and I think may be most important for the game over the long haul, is a focus on kids. We have to have more kids, period, playing the game. We have to have more of the best athletes playing the game in order to keep our product compelling on the field. Even putting the elite guys to one side, if you play, the chances you're going to be a fan go up dramatically. All the research shows that.

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Manfred has the right idea. MLB may be raking in the riches now, but that won't be the case if it can't attract younger fans. As Wendy Thurm put it in the New Yorker: "If kids are turning away from baseball now, there will be fewer adults to buy tickets, merchandise and cable-TV packages in the future."

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

As for how Manfred wants to attract younger fans to baseball, he's emphasized speeding up the game and advancing the league's technological reputation. Those good ideas are off to good starts. New pace-of-play rules have cut 10 minutes off the average game time, and the league's new Statcast program has created an entirely new (and really cool) way to perceive the action.

Apart from those two directives, Manfred had another priority up his sleeve.

"I think [increasing the profile of baseball's young stars] is really important for the future of the game," he told Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post in March. "I think it's important in terms of working with or attracting young fans to the game."

There's your kicker, and it's not a misguided kicker. The more you can sell baseball as a young man's game, the more it looks like a game for young people.

At the time he said that, Manfred wasn't blind to the fact that the game already had a strong collection of, in his words, "tremendously appealing" young stars to work with. And as far as marketing them, he said that an effort was already underway.

One of the things Manfred was referring to was the "THIS" ad campaign. Though it hasn't been focused exclusively on young stars, it's notably featured Trout, Stanton, Puig and guys like David Price and Felix Hernandez in such ways as to make them look cool, fan-friendly, larger than life or a combination of all three.

The campaign has continued into the season, and you can tell when watching this video starring Gallo, Bryant, Trout and Harper that MLB still has the same target audience in mind:

The message of this video translates to something like, "Hey, look at all the fun and exciting young players in our game!" And there are a lot more just like it, with the stars ranging from Pederson to McCutchen to Stanton to Harvey and so on and so on.

We are seeing MLB actively doing its best to market its most appealing young stars and not really being shy about which ones get attention. As the year moves along, don't be surprised when newcomers like Correa, Buxton and Lindor get their own moments in the "THIS" spotlight. MLB needs to cast as wide a net as possible in its efforts to appeal to younger fans, so it will take advantage of all the extra slack that has come courtesy of "The Year of the Call-Up."

Will MLB's plans for attracting younger viewers actually pan out? It's a good question, and there won't be an answer until the dust settles. And that may not be as soon as after this season.

But for now, we can lump MLB together with the Ghostbusters: It has the tools, and it has the talent.

By prioritizing a quicker and more technologically savvy game, MLB has cultivated the right kind of setting for a younger audience. And though that setting would only be good for so much without the young talent needed to perform in it, the league already had a lot of that, plus the pipeline is showing no signs of drying up.

Exactly where things go from here remains a good question. But as far as starting positions go, MLB couldn't be in a better spot.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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