Who Cares about TV Ratings
It's like a coworker bragging about SAT scores.... who actually cares?
Oh good it’s time for the annual ratings schadenfreude regarding the MLB postseason:
“World Series Game 2 posts record-low viewership: What’s impacting the numbers?” - The Athletic
“Game 1 least-watched World Series game in recorded history” - ESPN
“World Series Ratings Game 1 TV Audiences Hit All-Time Low” - Front Office Sports
“Analysis: World Series or not – viewership is baseball’s big problem” - CNN
By now, ChatGPT can just recycle the same stories they do every year for the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup too, just do a Find-Replace swapping in baseball for hockey and basketball and hit send.
Most People’s Baseball Season Ends when Their Team’s Does
I can tell you from over 30 years of experience, once my team is done for the year, my interest craters. And I watch more baseball than 99.5% of the country already.
You’re a fan of a team: you just spent all of March getting your hopes up, April and May convinced they still had a chance, June and July waiting for any signs of life, August and September hoping for a miracle. That’s the experience for fans of 20 teams. Four more fanbases flip off their TV’s after the play-in round, and four more after the division series. We just eliminated the 27th and 28th fanbases in the championship series. Twenty fan bases have now gone almost a month since their last meaningful baseball game.
Is there interest in the World Series? Of course! It’s the World Series. If my team is in it, I’m glued to the TV all series like those people who somehow found Succession interesting. And I’m still watching if a team I don’t hate is playing. Of course we just lifted our national curse and for the first time since 2016, the World Series will feature neither the Dodgers nor the Astros. If only we could warn ourselves in 2016 that we peaked as a country that year…
Do you think that after the Dodgers season ended with a thud that their fans are that excited about watching more baseball? Especially when it’s the team that tossed them from the playoffs like a bouncer booting a rowdy drunk from a bar. I’m sure Astros fans have no interest in celebrating the Rangers right now. Yankees fans have been pissed off at their team since July, Mets fans since birth.
And now I have to sit through A-Rod on the pregame show? Maybe that’s it. The ratings are low because of increased A-Rod airtime. But at least we got a flying Cookie Monster:
Who Really Cares About Ratings?
This is what I always think when I see these articles. Does my life change in any way whether Joe Random in Chicago watches the game or not? It’s not like MLB is paying their fans dividends based on viewership. The only time ratings matter is in a board room when league executives are trying to claw more money out of their advertising partners.
People just use ratings as a lame excuse to insult you. “Your sport just had the worst ratings ever!” So? I watched, and I enjoyed it. I have friends that watched and enjoyed it. I also have friends who have no idea baseball is even still playing right now. Am I supposed to feel bad for the league that they’re not watching?
When ratings are up, everything becomes exciting and fresh. When they’re down it seems like the sport is on life support. Here’s the thing: it’s the same sport either way. It goes on and people will either watch or not watch. Of all the things I can get mad or stressed about on any given day, the TV ratings for a professional sport is not even close to making it on the list.
These Are the Worst Ratings… So Far
This is going to be an ongoing trend. The changing of TV viewership is something that’s been happening for over a decade. There will never again be a time where any World Series game gets a 32.8 rating like in 1978. In fact, since 2012 there have only been two Fall Classic’s over 10.0. The Cubs’ win in 2016 (12.9) did well, but that was 100 years in the making with an epic game 7. The obvious answers are always brought up.
Excuse 1: No one cares about these teams
Every year that doesn’t involve the Yankees, Red Sox or Dodgers is immediately treated as “panic at MLB HQ!”. Guess what, there are people who root for other teams and they want to see their team win just as badly as those obnoxious New Yorkers and smug Dodger fans. Yes, the Yankees and Dodgers are the biggest fan bases in the biggest markets. Simple math tells you more people will watch, especially given that ESPN already spends 3 minutes a year covering anything baseball, and that’s mostly Yankees and Shohei Ohtani coverage.
But here’s the other side of that: fans of the 27 other teams aren’t tuning in in record numbers for those series. When I was growing up, I routinely chose an early season San Jose Sharks game over another broadcast of Derek Jeter and the Yankees for seemingly the 10th year in a row. And whenever the Cardinals are involved, I will actively search flights into the furthest reaches of the Canadian wilderness to avoid seeing that team in October ever again.
Excuse 2: No one watches TV anymore (or not like they used to)
I might get into the cord-cutting trend more later, but yes, I do think using TV ratings as your barometer for how interested the public is in something is rapidly becoming outdated. While the World Series is free over-the-air on Fox, the rest of the playoffs aren’t. So you’ve got to have a combination of TBS, TNT, truTV(???), ESPN and FS1 to piece together your postseason viewing. And you know what? That’s going to hurt ratings even more now that that cost of streaming services is now nearly as much as the cable we cut the cord from to begin with. YouTubeTV is now $72.99 a month for the base package, more than double the initial $35/mo price in 2017.
But look at other indicators of fan interest and you’ll see the game is fine, we’re just sick of television providers constantly raising prices for the same product. Attendance is at record levels, revenue, social media engagement. It’s just the TV part that has been impossible. This was the first year in a decade in Arizona I could watch Dbacks games without the local blackout from not having the cable package. No wonder no one knew who Alek Thomas was until he launched a pinch-hit homer into the pool a couple weeks ago.
Reality: It’s f***ing November!
Here’s an unreported major reason ratings are on that downward spiral. The postseason is dragging on far too long. No one wants Halloween baseball, and certainly not November baseball. Why does every corporation think if the consumer enjoys something, they’ll love being saturated with it? Do we need 17 regular season football games? Did we get to the 16th game when most teams are either clinched or eliminated and clamor for more of those second-string games? No. Did we actively complain when the 6th best teams in each league were being sent home after the season ended? Never once did I hear that. But oh boy did we get it.
In the 29 seasons of postseason play since the introduction of the Wild Card in 1995, the average start date of the World Series has slipped further and further down the calendar. From 1995 to 2004, October 20th was the average start date, meaning we were done no later than the 29th or 30th. The ratings average was 15.23. From 2005 to 2014, it crept to October 23rd with ratings averaging 9.50. And from 2015 to today, it is October 25th and 7.91. The average date of game 4 (the earliest a series can end) has gone from October 24th to October 29th.
Look at this year’s World Series and you’ll see what caused the ratings problems:
Game 1: Friday, October 27th. A Friday night at 8pm eastern? How many people in your core demographic are giving up their post-work week plans for a game 1?
Game 2: Saturday, October 28th. AKA the night of Halloween for working adults. Once again, who is staying in on a Saturday night for a game 2?
Game 3: Monday, October 30th. Not bad
Game 4: Tuesday, October 31st. Halloween night? What do you expect? And you’re going to force kids to choose between trick-or-treating and their favorite team? If I know anything about kids, once you mention candy, whatever the other option is has already lost. There was a game 4 in the 2001 World Series on Halloween, due do the schedule changes after 9/11. That game had the epic extra-innings, walk-off Derek Jeter home run. Do you know how much of that game I watched as a high schooler on the West Coast? The first two innings. Then it was out doing Halloween things (probably dressed as James Bond for the dozenth time)
Game 5: Wednesday, November 1st. Okay it’s Thanksgiving month. No Baseball November should become a thing.
And the league got incredibly lucky with a Diamondbacks-Rangers World Series, who both (tragically) play indoors. Look at the weather in these 4 big markets on October 27th and October 31st in 2023:
Let’s wrap this thing up a little faster. Do you want to become the NBA? Where the postseason runs two and a half months?! Let’s get the best teams playing for the right to hoist that “piece of metal” and go enjoy their offseason. By the start of November there’s just too many things tugging on our shirt sleeves for attention as sports fans. The NBA is tipping off, the NHL is hitting its stride a month in, the NFL is past the half-way point and firmly sucking up all the oxygen on the airwaves.
Baseball fans love baseball and come January 1st we will be begging for pitchers and catchers to report, signaling the start of spring. But don’t keep stretching this thing out and assume I am going to still be watching at the end. You shortened the games to great success this season. Maybe take the hint and address the season now?