If marketing baseball is like stepping up to the plate, and the problem of connecting with new fans is an incoming pitch, is it a fastball down Broadway, or a hellacious curve?

Karin Timpone, Major League Baseball’s new chief marketing officer, discusses that and more on the Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief Podcast.

Timpone joined MLB as executive VP and CMO last August and oversees the sport’s global marketing functions. She fills a CMO role that had been vacant since Jacqueline Parkes departed in 2016. (Barbara McHugh, MLB’s former senior VP of marketing, is now its senior VP of audience development and marketing). Prior to joining MLB, Timpone was CMO at Marriott International, and before that, a senior VP at The Walt Disney Co. She's also served prior roles as head of marketing and head of consumer/customer innovation at Yahoo Media Group, and senior VP at Universal Studios.

Timpone inherited a property with a fiercely loyal and long-tenured fan base, but one perceived as older and less diverse than followers of other sports, in part because baseball has long struggled to gain traction with younger fans. MLB's avid fans can also feel at times as though the sport doesn’t always love them back. Some still fiercely debate the designated hitter 50 years after it was first introduced; this season, fans are reminded that the controversial COVID-era “ghost runner” rule lives on not because the fans wanted it, but because an ugly labor dispute shortened spring training.

Timpone said she sees her primary challenge as “growing the next generation of fans” in ways that avid fans can perceive as “additive” to the game. Though still in its early innings (and with tactics and goals similar to those that McHugh has previously described), the plan is rooted in understanding the addressable market through data and segmenting. Then, the MLB works on using those findings to connect with fans in the places and the formats they prefer.

“The mandate that we see—and really [it goes for] all sports, and all media, [is] we’re all in an attention economy now,” Timpone said. “It’s about the share of mind, and the share of time that you have, to put your brand in front of your target fan.”

Doing that effectively involved uncovering insights about young or casual baseball fans and how they absorb the game that may be distinct from the routes their parents or grandparents took to baseball, she said. Among these is that the origin of fascination for many young fans isn’t loyalty to a team, but interest in the personalities, backstories and other interests of its players.

“A young fan really comes to the game through the door of the personality and the celebrity of a player,” Timpone said. “That's not incompatible with being a fan of a club, but it really means that we really need to put, front-and-center, the backstory of why that is so important.”

MLB has begun doing so by highlighting what Timpone described as “the right kind of game play, amplified the right way, on the right kinds of channels.”

A good example is the league’s current “Enjoy the Show” campaign that kicked off this spring when the labor tangle was settled, and was created by the league along with the agency Observatory. MLB has since self-produced 15-second social media videos that build on the theme by capturing some moments of high drama, in a way that can reveal “backstories” and, not coincidentally, highlight the game's cross-generational appeal.

Houston Astros rookie Jeremy Peña’s first career home run happened to coincide with a live televised interview of Peña’s proud parents seated in the stands and watching. That was rapidly turned into a spot that with a little targeted ad spend did “phenomenally well,” Timpone said. It hit avid fans who might recognize the father watching the play as Geronimo Peña, himself a one-time MLB player, but also introduced a fresh face along with a backstory with appeal to younger or casual fans.

Another begins with a home run by Yankees’ slugger Aaron Judge that’s caught in the stands by a supporter of the opposing club.

“Our players have lots of interesting stories—backstories about how they train, or their interest in food or music or style or fashion,” Timpone said. These can help casual fans or younger fans “stay close” with players, she said, and help baseball make a “legit connection” to them.

Ballplayers who choose walk-up music that home stadiums use to accompany their appearances in games offer opportunities for baseball to tell those stories, Timpone said. Other players might express an interest in food, such as Mets outfielder Mark Cahna, whose Instagram account reveals how a wealthy young foodie/athlete who spends all summer traveling feeds himself while doing so.

MLB similarly is looking at influencer fans for whom baseball and those wider culture movements intersect. Part of baseball’s forthcoming All-Star Game festivities will be what Timpone described as an “All-Star house” of influential content creators who have “incredible ways to tell the story” of baseball. One plan is through a “pro-am” style competition between 16 gamers and creators who together will play the video game MLB The Show 22 in front of a live audience.

The All-Star Game, scheduled for Dodger Stadium on July 19 and broadcast by Fox, culminates a “tentpole” showcase beginning July 15 of other ways the game wants to present itself to fans, also produced with Observatory. For the first time, baseball’s annual amateur draft will be a part of the festivities, for instance. There will be family events, a performance by Latin crossover star Becky G, a celebrity softball game, and the Futures Game featuring promising minor leaguers.

Be on the lookout for things like “celebrity front rows” and new twists such as live DJs in the dugout during the Home Run Derby. “You’re going to hear it about all over social,” Timpone said. “People are going to want to be there.”