Drawing viewers' eyes to lucrative television timeslots for advertisers, selling tickets to local stadiums, and selling merchandise such as jerseys and figures.
Those are all wealth transfers, though, not really value creation. The only value creation by the baseball players is the entertainment provided (which is definitely not nothing).
The baseball player brought joy to other humans, which is the whole bottom-line point of the entire economic system.
Lyft has burned piles of investor cash to give people artificially cheap taxi rides; the wealth-transfer is zero-sum and it's actually worse than that because their dumping distorts the real transport market (and exacerbates the negative externalities of cars). You could argue they've done some genuine value creation by being a more efficient taxi dispatcher, but if there was any substance to that then they'd have a profitable business.
