Would There Be Baseball After Thanos?

At the beginning of Avengers: Endgame, the camera flies over an empty Citi Field, showing us that major league baseball is just one of the casualties of Thanos' "snap". If the baseball season can be cancelled for a virus that has killed 100,000 Americans, then surely it would be stopped by a super-villian killing more than 160 million Americans.

Right?

Citi Field, abandoned after the Thanos snap.

Well, arguments have been made on both sides. But what we do know is that, financially, Major League Baseball would be fine. Eliminating 50% of all major league players would cause team payrolls to drop by 50% — but demand for tickets would only drop by about 30%. At least in the short term, Major League Baseball would actually be more profitable.

To understand why, we look at the research I did for Baseball Mogul's economic engine. This analysis showed that team revenue doesn't grow linearly with the number of people in that team's fan base. Roughly speaking, team revenue is a function of the square root of the population in the team's metropolitan area.

For one example, look at the Philadelphia Phillies and Baltimore Orioles. Baltimore's metropolitan area (2.8 million people) is 54% smaller than Philadelphia's (6.1 million), but the Orioles' 2019 revenue ($256 million) is only about 35% lower than the Phillies' revenue ($392 million).

According to this relationship, if Thanos made 50% of all Philly fans disappear, team revenue would only drop by about 33%. The country would be in shock. But unlike our current situation, there's no economic reason baseball couldn't return.