In their build-up to the All-Star game, Fox and Major League Baseball used everything but the fire-eater, the sword-swallower and the bearded lady. They were intent on turning the game into a sideshow, a carnival, anything that would induce people to watch and thus increase the ratings.
They flooded their programs – the network – with commercials featuring a series of players as pitchmen, or carneys, as they were called in the sideshow habitat.
“The battle for the post-season begins here,” one player pitchman said.
“The road to October begins here,” another said.
M.L.B., of course, aided and abetted its broadcast partner with all of its outlets. It has an equal stake in the ratings because the higher they are the more Fox will pay for rights to games. So on Tuesday, the day of the game, MLB.com sent out a notice to its subscribers, reminding recipients to “Watch tonight on Fox 7:30 p.m.” and of these auxiliary attractions: All-Star Red Carpet show on M.L.B. network, All-Star mvp vote, All-Star bingo – play for a chance to win a 2012 World Series trip.
It reached the point where I thought that’s all there would be; the game would never start. As it turned out, that might have been better.
The National League scored five runs against Justin Verlander in the first inning, and they might as well not have bothered playing the remaining eight and a half innings.
Is that how the World Series link inspired the American League to win and give its pennant winner homefield advantage (Games 1, 2, 6, 7) in the Series?
Commissioner Bud Selig and other advocates say the link motivates the players to play harder and more inspired. Years ago, when the National and American leagues took their separation seriously, the N.L. president, Warren Giles, gave his team a pep talk each year before the game, and the N.L. dominated the game.
If there was any inspiration this year, it came from the retiring Chipper Jones, the veteran Atlanta Braves star, who addressed the N.L. players briefly before the game.
If the American League players have been playing harder and more inspired because of the World Series link, I’d hate to see what they would produce if they weren’t playing harder and more inspired.
In the last three games, the American League has scored a total of two runs, an average of not even one a game, and collected 18 hits. It seemed as though the N.L. had that many hits in the first inning alone Tuesday night.
How bad has the A.L. been? This is only the second time in All-Star history that one league has scored no more than one run in each of three successive games, matching the 1966-68 N.L. teams. But the N.L. won all three of those games, 2-1, 2-1 and 1-0.
Given that the N .L. did its damage in this game early, the A.L. had plenty of time to catch up. So how did the A.L. respond? With intensive inspiration naturally. Derek Jeter led off the A.L. half of the first with an infield single, and he was the only A.L. baserunner in the first three innings.
“This is depressing,” Tim McCarver, the veteran Fox analyst, said as the N.L. scored an additional three runs in the fourth inning.
There would be no more scoring in this scintillating game that gave an unknown National League team homefield advantage in the World Series. Given the contribution of three members of the Giants to the N.L. victory, it would be appropriate for the Giants to play in the World Series.
What if, on the other hand, the Cincinnati Reds won the National League pennant? Their trio of players did not distinguish themselves in the game and did nothing to help the N.L. win it. Joey Votto and Jay Bruce batted a combined five times and made five outs, including three with runners in scoring position, and Aroldis Chapman pitched a third of an inning and walked a batter.
Despite the lopsided nature of the game, Joe Buck, Fox’s head cheerleader, found something positive to relate to what by then was a rapidly shrinking audience.
“Despite the score,” Buck said in the ninth inning, “the ballpark is still packed.”
Having paid dearly for their tickets, the fans presumably had stayed in their seats at Kauffman Stadium hoping a game would break out.
M.L.B. put a different spin on the game’s television audience. It issued a news release the next day, in effect, proclaiming victory for the World Series link without mentioning it.
The game, M.L.B. said, produced an increase in the overnight ratings from last season – a whopping 3 percent, from last year’s 7.9 to 8.1. Let me point out a couple of things about that claim.
M.L.B. gets to a 3 percent increase by rounding off the actual percentage, which is 2.53. Had the increase been .04 lower, 2.49, rounding it off would have made the increase even less, 2 percent.
More significantly, though, final ratings are always lower than overnight ratings. A year ago, to use the most recent example, the overnight ratings were 7.9 and the final 6.9 while the year before they were 9.1 overnight and 7.5 final. Both sets of figures were Fox’s lowest for any All-Star game and, of course, the lowest for the games played under the World Series link.
The final ratings have been lower than the overnights for each of the nine linked games, ranging in difference from 1.0 to 2.4. The pattern doesn’t figure to change this year when final ratings come out.