The Mariners made 2026 digital shorts without an agency as MLB clubs bring video production in-house

The Seattle Mariners made four commercials for the 2026 season and didn't hire an agency to make any of them. For decades the club's spots came from Copacino Fujikado, the Seattle advertising shop whose Mariners work set the standard for the genre, according to Sports Business Journal's Mike Mazzeo. This year every frame was shot, produced and edited by club staff.

The club doesn't even call them commercials anymore. They're digital shorts.

Seattle is not an outlier. Mazzeo reports that most MLB clubs now do the bulk of their video production internally, with setups that vary and outside vendors brought in only occasionally for complicated shoots. What was once a marketing support function has become, in the words of the executives running it, the main driver of the business. That claim deserves scrutiny, and the numbers behind it are more specific than most in-housing stories offer.

What $101 million of social value actually buys

A Zoomph study cited by Sports Business Journal put the Los Angeles Dodgers at the top of MLB with $101 million in social media value generated from team accounts in the 2025 season, on 2.51 billion impressions and 122 million engagements. Zoomph's definition matters here. Social value is the estimated media value of a post, built from impressions, video views and engagements, and expressed as the cost of reaching the same audience through paid advertising.

So the $101 million is avoided spend, not cash the Dodgers collected. That distinction changes how the figure should be used. For a creative director or CMO weighing agency retainers against an internal studio, the honest comparison is paid-equivalent reach against the fully loaded cost of staff, gear and edit time, not agency fees against studio salaries.

Zoomph's marketing director, Dan LaTorraca, made a related point to SBJ: any of these clubs could have bought equivalent reach with paid campaigns, but reach on its own doesn't build fandom. Organic content, in his framing, humanizes players and builds a sense of pride that paid impressions don't. That is Zoomph's interpretation, and Zoomph sells the measurement, but the mechanism it describes is the same one the clubs cite when they explain why they staffed up.

The edge is access, not equipment

Keri Zierler, the Mariners' creative director, told Sports Business Journal that the real advantage of an internal team is relationships. Her staff meet players as they come up through the farm system, so by the time a catcher is an All-Star the people filming him already know how he talks and what he finds funny. An agency arriving cold for a two-day shoot doesn't have that, and Zierler's argument is that the trust shows up on screen as more authentic stories.

The four Seattle shorts bear that out. One gives catcher Cal Raleigh an alter ego, "Hal Baleigh," a deliberate echo of the "Larry Bernandez" character built around pitcher Felix Hernandez 14 years earlier. Another, "Babyproof," plays on how many new fathers are on the roster, a theme SBJ notes lands with fans who will never throw a triple-digit fastball. Neither idea requires a big budget. Both require knowing the clubhouse.

For a sports property, or any consumer brand, whose creative staff can't get within arm's length of the talent, the model transfers poorly. The Mariners' advantage as Zierler describes it is proximity, and proximity is an organizational fact, not a line item. Clubs that occasionally hire vendors for complex shoots, per Mazzeo's reporting, are effectively buying technical capacity while keeping the relationship layer in-house.

The New York Mets are pushing the same logic into longer formats. Bobby Clemens, the Mets' vice president of creative content, told SBJ the club wants fans to feel closer to the team than they ever have and that content has shifted over the years from supporting the games to driving the business. The stated goals across clubs, as Mazzeo summarizes them, are inside access, brand affinity and engagement, with viewership and ticket sales as a hoped-for but not directly claimed result. That hedge is worth noting. Nobody in the piece asserts a clean line from a viral short to a sold seat.

A 104.3 mph fastball, an apple and the shelf life of a clip

The Milwaukee Brewers drew attention from inside the industry this spring with two ideas from Carter Green, the club's senior videographer and creative lead, according to Sports Business Journal. One used editing to make it appear that pitcher Jacob Misiorowski, who has been clocked at 104.3 mph, knocked an apple off top prospect Cooper Pratt's head while Pratt sat backward at the regulation 60 feet, 6 inches. The other was a "Day in the Life" video of outfielder Sal Frelick styled after "Grand Theft Auto."

Stunts like these are the visible output. The operating discipline sits underneath. Tim Walsh, Seattle's senior director of digital marketing and social media, told SBJ the strategy question is how a short carries weight beyond a single post, and Mazzeo reports that a well-executed video can feed a promotional giveaway, a ballpark theme night or a ticket special. Clubs also now have real-time fan reaction data, so a concept can be judged within hours rather than after the season.

That gives an operator a cleaner yardstick than view counts. If a Hal Baleigh short becomes a bobblehead night and a ticket package, the studio has produced an asset. If it collects impressions and disappears, it was a one-off. The clubs quoted by SBJ are explicit that the second outcome is the one they're organizing to avoid, and Walsh framed the whole effort as building the next generation of Mariners fans, which is a multi-season goal measured in season tickets, not likes.

The same in-housing move is reaching live game broadcasts

Short-form studios are one layer of a broader shift in who produces baseball content. At the SVG Regional Sports Production Summit 2026, Sports Video Group reported that MLB Local Media now produces local game broadcasts for 14 clubs and handles in-market streaming and local linear TV distribution for nearly half the league. The league-run operation, led by Doug Johnson, SVP and executive producer of local media, and Kendall Burgess, VP of operations for local media, has added live drones, Wire Cam, Umpire Cam and deeper player access to those productions.

Individual clubs are going further. Sports Video Group's account of the BravesVision launch says the Atlanta Braves brought broadcast operations fully in-house and stood up their own network with less than two months before Opening Day, with leadership aiming for a full content platform rather than a replacement regional channel. Two months is a brutal timeline for a network build. It indicates how much production capability some clubs already had on staff before the switch was flipped.

The distribution side has been moving the same direction for longer. Front Office Sports' Eric Fisher reported in February 2025 that the Mets and SportsNet New York launched a direct-to-consumer stream of local games, making the Mets the 22nd MLB club with such an offering. Commissioner Rob Manfred said at the time that a hybrid of linear and streaming revenue would persist for an interim period, and that the league plans to pool national and local rights into a centralized strategy in 2028, when current deals with ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery expire.

National money is realigning too. Adweek's Jason Notte, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported in August 2025 that NBCUniversal was nearing a three-year deal with MLB worth roughly $200 million annually for Sunday night games on NBC and additional streaming on Peacock, while The Athletic reported the same day that ESPN was near an agreement to fold MLB.TV into its streaming app. Both were reported as pending, not signed.

Put together, the pattern is consistent: clubs and the league are taking control of the camera at every level, from a 30-second short about new dads to a nine-inning broadcast. For a facilities or media-operations lead at a team that still outsources most of its video, the question the Mariners' example raises is a narrow one. Where does the internal team have access an outside partner can't get, and is that access being used, or just sitting in the clubhouse?

The 2028 rights consolidation is the next fixed date on the calendar, and the clubs building studios now are betting that owning the content, and the relationships behind it, will be worth more when that pooled deal gets negotiated.