THE DRUM | MLB already had female fans, it just took a while to market to them
More female fans attend MLB games than any other professional sports league in America, according to consumer research firm MRI-Simmons. Women are buying merch, watching games and increasingly working inside the industry itself. By any measure, female baseball fandom is an established, growing force. So why has it taken this long for the league to build a content strategy around it?
That question is at the heart of MLB’s new partnership with The Gist, the women-led sports media company that has spent eight years covering sports the way its audience actually wants to consume them. The Gist launched in 2018 on a founding premise: that female fans and other audiences historically ignored by traditional sports media deserved better. It now reaches more than 40 million fans monthly across its newsletter, social channels and podcast. For that community, a dedicated baseball content stream is arriving at a moment when interest in the sport is already climbing. “Over the last year, baseball showed the largest jump in interest with Gisters of any sport,” said Jacie deHoop, co-founder and head of partnerships at The Gist. “As one of the top pro sports leagues our community cares about, we know our female and Gen Z fans are paying attention to baseball.”
What makes the partnership revealing, from a marketing standpoint, is what it exposes about how sports leagues have historically approached female audiences. The assumption that women needed to be converted into fans, or that baseball was a male-dominated space with a female fringe, was never supported by the attendance data. The audience existed. The tailored content did not.
Alex Cadicamo, MLB’s vice-president of media business development and strategy, said: “We’ve always had a dedicated female fan base and we’re continuing to see growing engagement from women and younger audiences across the game.” The data backs that up. MLB’s 2024 season recorded its highest attendance in seven years, with overall figures up 11% since the introduction of new pace-of-play rules in 2022. Viewership among younger audiences followed: ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball, FS1 and MLB Network all posted double-digit growth in the 18-34 demographic. The sport is gaining ground with precisely the audiences that have historically been hardest to reach.
The revenue picture for female sports fandom tells a similar story of underestimated demand. Deloitte projected women’s sports would cross the $1bn revenue threshold in 2024. The actual figure came in at $1.8bn. CivicScience data from 2026 shows that among those who watch MLB, the increase in betting intent is largely driven by women fans, with a three-point jump year-over-year compared with a single-point uptick among male fans, a signal of deepening engagement beyond passive viewership.
For The Gist, those numbers confirm what its own audience data has been showing. The partnership is designed to meet fans on the platforms they already use, in a tone that reflects how sports intersect with the rest of their lives. That is precisely what has driven The Gist’s growth with Gen Z readers and why deHoop describes the current moment as one in which “sports and culture are colliding.” MLB’s partnership with The Gist, alongside existing commitments like its tie-up with the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, suggests the league is investing in closing the distance between its content infrastructure and the audience it already has.
Baseball’s female fanbase was never a niche to be developed. It was an audience waiting for the marketing to catch up.
