Do World Series Television Ratings Matter?
Or am I just delusional?
Do World Series Television Ratings Matter?
I fondly remember the 1997 World Series.
I was 13 years old at the time, and was really excited. Cleveland hadn’t won a championship in 49 years, and the Marlins hadn’t ever won a title. I remember watching every single game on television, staring in wonder at forgotten moments, like the snowfall in game 4.
I also remember the negative press.
I thought about this the other day, when negative articles about the 2023 World Series ratings started popping up online.
We’ve been down this road before. And, amazingly, the game hasn’t disappeared yet.
The Golden Age
The golden age of baseball on television was clearly the late 1970s.
Wikipedia has an excellent article on World Series television ratings. Though the table it presents is apparently not easy to export and mess around with, you can get a good idea just by glancing at the data.
Here are the ratings from 1975 to 1985. The first column is the average rating for the entire series; the next columns list the games, from 1 to 7 (if played):
Boxes highlighted in green indicate all-time high ratings.
I’ve watched every single one of these games (I know, I know, I need new hobbies). Here are a few observations, based on my experience and the data:
NBC was the better network. It’s not surprising to see NBC broadcasts get higher ratings on average, with the exception of 1984. NBC’s broadcast quality was far superior in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ABC didn’t really start catching up until the 1983 World Series, in my opinion — and even then it spent far too much time showing random shots of player wives in the crowd.
Longer Series Result In Increased Interest. This is obvious in all the World Series ratings we have. Casual fans will watch the first game out of curiosity, and will usually then ignore the event until the 6th or 7th game. If we don’t get that far, they simply won’t tune in.
Close Series Have Better Viewership. 1984 was an obvious blowout; it would have probably received higher ratings if the Cubs had held on to beat the Padres. Similarly, the 1976 Yankees were clearly overmatched per every prognosticator, resulting in the unusually low ratings for the first game.
The Modern Age
Okay — now let’s look at the ugly age.
Boxes highlighted in red represent all-time lows.
A few notes:
FOX isn’t great at broadcasting baseball. This is pretty obvious if you watch a few innings from any World Series broadcast FOX has done, and then immediately watch a few innings from any one of the old NBC broadcasts. It’s not that FOX is completely incompetent at broadcasting baseball. The problem, rather, is that FOX doesn’t know how to make it engaging. Baseball broadcasts on FOX feel like NASCAR broadcasts to me — lots of action, lots of camera angles, but no real feel for drama. In contrast, Harry Coyle really knew what he was doing.
Storylines are key. Game 7 of the 2016 World Series isn’t going to happen every year, of course. Major League Baseball did a great job of milking the Cubs curse that season, though. You wonder why they couldn’t do something similar for the Washington Nationals in 2019, what with the frustration during the Strasburg era, the lack of a victory in Montreal, and the fact that Washington DC hadn’t seen a winner since 1924. It’s not enough to have a World Series with good storyline potential. You’ve got to work it to get the fans.
Baseball is increasingly regionally divided. Gone are the days when the sweep 1990 Athletics attracted a large national audience (20.8/36 average), despite the ineptitude of the CBS broadcast and the “small market” status of Oakland and Cincinnati. Without a great storyline like we had in 2016, World Series ratings seem to be directly tied to the markets involved. Even the 2000 Subway Series didn’t do particularly well, pulling in a 12.4/21 average for an all-time low at the time.
Does It Matter?
But that brings us to the big question: So What?
I mean, is baseball really hurting financially? Do we really believe that Major League Baseball’s future media deals are going to be pitifully small? Are there articles out there forecasting a PAC-12 media future for Major League Baseball, one that pushes it far behind other sports?
We know that Super Bowl television ratings remain stellar. But we also know that television ratings in general have fallen, due largely to the glut of entertainment options we have today.
And baseball isn’t doing all that bad. On average, that 2016 World Series eclipsed the top rated non-sports programming during the 2016-17 television season. As for the 2023 World Series, well, just take a look at Nielsen’s top 10 list for the the week of the first two games:
Sure, it’s not football — but baseball is still holding its own. Getting millions of people to watch the same thing these days is quite a feat in and of itself.
Does baseball really care about these ratings? Does it really want to fix things? If so, I’d recommend considering the following:
Assisting the networks with broadcast directing. Somebody needs to go back and review the Harry Coyle art of broadcasting. We don’t need more replay angles and more predictable shots. We need somebody to bring back the art of baseball broadcasting.
Hype up the storylines. I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t know a single name on the 2023 Diamondbacks. Where were the online articles hyping up the matchup? Is there no hype train anymore?
Reduce the number of postseason teams. Yes, I know that TV networks pay big money for the postseason, and, yes, I know that the old fashioned pennant races I love so much aren’t as good for ratings. However, the truth is that even the most passionate fan is going to get tired of watching game after game at some point. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
Consider more one game playoffs. If baseball really wants to go down the NFL Lite road, it should consider ditching postseason series and just playing single games. Barring that, perhaps an in-season single elimination tournament on the lines of the NBA’s new experiment would be in order. Maybe we could also include teams in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.