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TV Ratings: World Series Opener Hits 5-Year Low

Y2kTheNewOldies

Y2kTheNewOldies

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/l...-is-us-tv-ratings-tuesday-oct-22-2019-1249519

Baseball's Fall Classic is down by more than a million viewers vs. 2018's first game.
The first game of the World Series delivered a ratings win for Fox on Tuesday, but it fell short of last year's opener. Regular programming on other networks was mostly unaffected, with NBC's This Is Us and several other shows actually improving week to week.

The Washington Nationals' 5-4 win over the Houston Astros in game one of the World Series averaged 12.19 million viewers for Fox, adjusted up from 11.58 million in the fast nationals. Tuesday's audience is the lowest for a World Series opener since 2014 (also 12.19 million) and is off by 11 percent from last year's 13.76 million viewers.
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Not Surprising given its a regional audience such as Houston and Washington DC would get the highest viewers though.
 
Sure they would have had more viewers if it had been Dodgers vs Yankees, just by the mass in those two cities.

But ALL live sports numbers are down, as are all live event numbers. It's 20th century metrics trying to capture a 21st century audience.

The article says the ratings for the other traditional broadcast networks were unaffected. Of course that's true. Fans of regular series won't desert their favorite shows to watch an out of town baseball game. That would be crazy. MLB really hasn't done much to develop an audience for generic baseball...it's all about the specific teams.
 
TheBigA said:
MLB really hasn't done much to develop an audience for generic baseball...it's all about the specific teams.
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I've always wondered what kind of ratings those fondly remembered NBC Saturday "Game of the Week" telecasts got back in the '60s and '70s. I know ESPN's Sunday night games are usually marginal, and the weeknight ESPN and weekend FS1 neutral matchups barely register at all. So were Yankees and Dodgers fans back in the day really flocking to those Reds-Pirates and Orioles-Twins games being shown on NBC? I realize there wasn't much competition for eyeballs back then -- and none at all for sports eyeballs in the summer except for golf, tennis and the occasional big horse race -- but it was still "generic baseball," as you put it.
 
CTListener said:
but it was still "generic baseball," as you put it.
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I think the fact that there were fewer teams at that time led to less localism and more interest in various team rivalries. Then the development of Super Stations were great for the Cubs and the Braves. You had "the national past-time" and "America's team." Not any more. Moving forward, their audience will be limited to their specific town.

The bad news about expansion is it creates no audience for the generic sport, just the local team.
 
CTListener said:
I've always wondered what kind of ratings those fondly remembered NBC Saturday "Game of the Week" telecasts got back in the '60s and '70s.
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Looks like high 6 ratings in the late '70s. That's rating, not share. The closest comparables I can find this year are for two Fox games in June (1st and 24th), both of which earned a 0.5 rating among adults 18-49.
 
Forgot about WPIX, WWOR and WSBK as SuperStations in Cable's early years with their Mets, Yankees and Red Sox games as well.
 
I don't think the ratings will be improving as this series moves along. Saturday's game was over in the first inning. College football has more drama.

Neither of these teams have fan bases beyond their home areas, and the games themselves didn't have enough action to keep non-homers interested.
 
TheBigA said:
I don't think the ratings will be improving as this series moves along. Saturday's game was over in the first inning. College football has more drama.

Neither of these teams have fan bases beyond their home areas, and the games themselves didn't have enough action to keep non-homers interested.
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If there's a Game 7, it will attract casual viewers that the other six haven't. Lack of action is a huge problem. Too much swing and miss, too many pop-ups and fly balls as analytics are suffocating the sport. It's all about power pitching and launch angle now, which means all the pitchers throw 95+ and all the batters try to hit the ball as far as they can with just about every swing. Every single team is on board with this new way of approaching baseball and it is making the sport virtually unwatchable. I usually watch postseason games every day, as many as I can, right from the start of the playoffs. This year, I've had them on in the background, on radio, while I watch hockey or football or even boxing on TV or via streaming.
 
Don CT said:
Was WPIX ever a true superstation like TBS?
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No. Neither was WSBK. They were distributed by microwave relay to cable systems around the Northeast. Not sure about WWOR. They may have gone national via satellite toward the end, but I'm not thinking that was the case. Anyway, Syndex eventually killed them off as anything but local stations.
 
CTListener said:
No. Neither was WSBK. They were distributed by microwave relay to cable systems around the Northeast. Not sure about WWOR. They may have gone national via satellite toward the end, but I'm not thinking that was the case. Anyway, Syndex eventually killed them off as anything but local stations.
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I remember as a kid watching WPIX and WWOR, as well as Fox 5.
 
At one time WWOR was carried on Dyersburg, TN's cable system until they dropped the national feed. During the short time I had Dish in the early 2000's I had the option to get WSBK since I couldn't get WLMT UPN (at the time) 30 in Memphis, but I decided not to because it cost extra and I didn't find that much I wanted to see on it. I never saw WPIX on cable anywhere in my area.

At about that same time Dish had a superstation package available, I think with WWOR, WSBK, WPIX, and possibly others available, but I never got it, and I dropped them completely because of contract disputes, which really weren't nearly as bad then as they are now, but I don't regret it.
 
CTListener said:
No. Neither was WSBK. They were distributed by microwave relay to cable systems around the Northeast. Not sure about WWOR. They may have gone national via satellite toward the end, but I'm not thinking that was the case. Anyway, Syndex eventually killed them off as anything but local stations.
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WWOR was on Atlanta's Prime Cable in the early 80s when it was just WOR.
 
TheBigA said:
So Sunday's game did better than Saturday with more than 10 million viewers (at least for the first few innings), but when the football game started, that's where everyone went. Packers-Chiefs game got 16 million viewers. The MLB shouldn't even try to compete against SNF:

https://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/daily-ratings/tv-ratings-sunday-oct-27-2019/
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THey used to not compete with Monday Night Football when it wsa on ABC, so it looks like competing against Sunday Night Football on NBC makes even less sense.
 
anotherguy said:
THey used to not compete with Monday Night Football when it wsa on ABC, so it looks like competing against Sunday Night Football on NBC makes even less sense.
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I wonder what Fox is promising its advertisers for ratings. At what point do the "make goods" kick in? It's got to be a tough task for the sales folks, with baseball becoming an ultra-regional sport to the extent that the games don't put up anything close to the numbers of the glory years unless teams from New York, Chicago or Los Angeles are involved. Did they promise the advertisers superb ratings if the matchup was Yankees-Dodgers and rock-bottom ratings if it was Rays-Brewers?
 
Watching baseball on FOX is awful. 30 second advertisements in between pitches is terrible and only FOX does it. Plus not many people can stand Joe Buck calling the game. Unfortunately FOX has baseball till 2028
 
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