Exploring Fan Advocacy in Sport: “Save our Spikes” and the Proposal to Change MiLB

November 9, 2020

By: Dr. Virginia S. Harrison, Assistant Professor, Clemson University

Christen Buckley, Ph.D. Candidate, Pennsylvania State University

On October 18, 2019, the New York Times released a list of 42 minor league baseball teams across the United States that were slated for elimination by Major League Baseball (MLB) after the 2020 season. The news shocked minor league team officials (Sanchez, 2020), who launched communications campaigns aimed at showing the importance of the teams to their local communities. One such campaign included the Save Our Spikes campaign in State College, PA, pictured here. Through tactics like holding local rallies with media or displaying signage, teams encouraged fan advocacy as critical parts of their campaigns. The outlook turned particularly bleak when COVID-19 shut down the minor league baseball season for all of 2020, leaving the 42 teams in limbo.

State College Save Our Spikes campaign tweet.

Our study seeks to understand the dynamics of the fan advocacy and team communication efforts behind the Save Our Spikes campaign and those like it across the minor leagues. Given the unprecedented nature of this announcement coupled with COVID-19, we want to know how fans engage in and view advocacy as part of their fandom. Additionally, how are teams’ strategic communications departments motivating fan advocacy? Advocacy literature typically focuses on nonprofit actions and work toward a specific cause (e.g., Corning & Myers, 2002), and our study takes a new direction with scholarship by applying these nonprofit principles to sport.

Baseball fans around the country are fighting for MiLB teams.
Photo by Jose Francisco Morales

We also want to understand how fans feel about their local minor league teams. Unlike relationships with major professional teams, minor league fan affiliations are unique and often tied to community identity (Wear & Heere, 2019; Wegner, Delia & Baker, 2018). While research exists on the impacts of professional sports teams moving to new towns (Mitrano, 1999), little research focuses on this connection for minor league professional teams. The current situation is a unique opportunity to look at the ways that fans show support for their teams when their existence is threatened.

We are conducting a three-pronged methodology to tackle this issue: interviews with fans and team officials, fan survey, and social media content analysis. We are still looking for interview participants and would love to hear from you if you are a fan of a minor league baseball team or employee of a minor league baseball team. Please reach out to Dr. Virginia Harrison, vsharri@clemson.edu, or Christen Buckley, clb5344@psu.edu, to see if you are eligible for the study. We look forward to sharing the results of our work with you in a future post!

References

Corning, A. F. & Myers, D. J. (2002). Individual orientation toward engagement in social action. Political Psychology, 23(4), 703-729. DOI: www.jstor.org/stable/3792364.

Mitrano, J. R. (1999). The “sudden death” of hockey in Hartford: Sports fans and franchise relocation. Sociology of Sport Journal, 16, 134-154.

Sanchez, R. (2020, May 19). “Minor league baseball in crisis.” Sports Illustrated. Accessed https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/05/19/minor-league-baseball-is-in-crisis.

Wear, H. & Heere, B. (2019). Brand New: A Longitudinal Investigation of Brand Associations as Drivers of Team Identity Among Fans of a New Sport Team. Journal of Sport Management. Advanced publication doi: 10.1123/jsm.2018-0204.

Wegner, C. E., Delia, E. B., & Baker, B. J. (2018). Fan response to the identity threat of potential team relocation. Sport Management Review. Advanced publication doi: 10.1016/j.smr.2019.01.001