The previous column on declining television audiences for the World Series prompted interesting enough responses to warrant a second column on the subject. First, a review of the developments from the recently concluded World Series between the winning Giants and the losing Royals:
- It had the third smallest audience of the 41 World Series that have been tracked since 1973.
- Of the 13 World Series that have gone seven games in that time, it had the smallest audience.
- It was the 10th successive World Series that drew an average audience under 20 million. In the last 21 of Bud Selig’s 22-year tenure as commissioner, the World Series television audience has been below 30 million.
- Regular-season National Football League games have drawn higher Nielsen ratings than this year’s World Series games. National Basketball Association finals have drawn higher Nielsen ratings the last five years and six of the last seven.
Readers have offered a variety of reasons for the decline in viewers. Clark Griffith, a former executive of the Minnesota Twins agreed in his blog clarkgriffithblog.com with a point I made in my column.
“Now, with interleague play every day,” he wrote, “the World Series has become just another interleague play series and there is no drama, other than having two great teams play each other.”
A former baseball executive wrote in an e-mail, “MLB and FOX are both powerful forces, but MLB allowed FOX to bully them into allowing the LCS onto Fox Sports 1, instead of FOX.”
Fox Sports1 is a relatively new cable sports channel to which not everyone has access, meaning an absence of potential viewers.
“So Fox ‘gained,’ presumably by using baseball playoffs to get people to find their new station, and baseball ‘lost’ by having the games so hard to find. Gone were two weeks of promotion and marketing of the Giants and Royals which would have made the WS much more interesting for those just discovering those teams.
“For people in hotels, forget about finding FS1 or MLB Network for that matter.
“Not much of a partnership.”
A person familiar with television sports programming noted that the five least watched and lowest rated World Series games – this year’s Game 4 is fifth – were all played on Saturday night.
“If these games were being scheduled exclusively for TV, like the NBA,” he wrote, “games wouldn’t be played on Friday and Saturday, but MLB insists on maintaining regular season-type continuity as best it can, plus it comes under fierce fire should the series extend into November. BTW, MLB takes fewer days to contest its playoffs than the NBA and NHL, by far, and even the NFL.
“Also keep in mind that MLB has mid-week afternoon games in its postseason, unlike the NFL, NBA or NHL. Also, WS start times are earlier that most every other championship – NBA, NHL, NCAA Championship, BCS, etc. Truth be told, to maximize the audience from coast to coast, the MLB games would start later, around 8:30, like they did under Fay Vincent during the CBS years. It is also a myth that more young people would watch day games. The fact is that more people of all ages are available to watch TV in prime time than during the day.”
I don’t doubt that fewer “young people” would be available to watch World Series games during the day, at least Mondays through Fridays because they are in school, but they aren’t available after 11 o’clock at night, which is when games finish on the East Coast.
As for games having started later when Vincent was commissioner, the irony of that is that as much as he still loves baseball Vincent, now 76 years old, is not a regular viewer of post-season night games and didn’t watch this year’s Game 7 of the World Series because of the lateness of the game.
We talk regularly, and our October conversations are often about the late night finishes of games.
Here’s a reader with day baseball in mind:
“The obvious antidote for low TV ratings for Baseball Showcase events (including All-Star Game and playoffs) is the return of day baseball, especially on weekends. Every other sport plays its All-Star Game on the weekend. And there is no excuse for starting games so late even if they are night games – the vast majority of potential viewers (who live in the Eastern time zone) can’t stay up to see the end. Starting at 8p is stupid for Sunday Night Baseball during the season but preposterous for postseason, especially when most teams start their games at 7p.”
More on scheduling:
“One of the big problems with the World Series is the scheduling, ironically which is done for maximum TV viewership, when it might just be bringing down the numbers.
“Because both League Championship Series were over so quickly, there was a weekend in October where no baseball was played. That’s simply insane. The teams sat idle for four or five days. Instead of unbridled anticipation, that layover left a lot of casual observers wondering if the whole thing was over.
“If there is such a thing as momentum, it is surely squelched by the rigid schedule … games one and two of the World Series could have been started in the slots Fox was already going to use for games 6 and 7 of the LCS.
And another:
“With regard to your comments on the decline in World Series TV viewership, I wonder what the viewership was by time zone. In the East many working people get up early to go to work. Staying up for games that end at 11:30PM for 2 or 3 nights in a row can really tire one out. Also kids cannot stay up that late particularly on school nights so parents watching with kids is no longer an option.
“I am now retired, but my body clock is still on a working man’s schedule so I watch perhaps 5 or 6 innings of the game and then record the balance which I watch the next morning before learning the final score. This process is good for my rest, but it certainly detracts from the excitement of watching a game live. I watched game 7 live to its conclusion on the theory that I had the off season to catch up on my sleep.
“Regular season night games in New York and other East Coast cities start at 7PM. I do not think baseball and the TV networks will make a change, but in the future if one of the teams in the World Series is from the Eastern Time Zone, it would be a leap forward to start games at 7PM.”
Remember, though, that a 7 o’clock game in New York is a 4 o’clock game in Los Angeles, when people are not yet home from work and able to watch the game. That fact of time-zone life would also affect audience size.
Back to inter-league play.
“I think you’re onto to something,” a reader wrote, “with the notion that inter-league play is a factor in the World Series’ declining viewership, but as you suggest, it is merely one factor among many. I am personally no fan of inter-league play, or for that matter the unbalanced schedule. I suspect, though, that anyone who was a fan enough to watch the Royals play the Giants in August was still probably tuning in.
“What is lost is the allure of the matchup, the mystery. And that is a shame. Of course, the game used to be wrapped in layers of mystery and now every game is available to everyone with a computer. Personally, I am more than willing to make that trade. It is a beautiful game and I can’t get enough of it.”
And another e-mail on the subject of inter-league play:
“I doubt that the reason for a decline in World Series TV viewers is due to the fact that some of the teams might have played each other in the regular season. That also happens in the NFL – where they play far fewer games – and does not seem to have an impact on the Super Bowl. Actually, there would be a way empirically to test this in baseball by looking at viewership in World Series matchups where teams have played each other in the regular season and matchups when they have not.
“The real issue is what changes could be made to increase the audience without changing too much the nature of the series. It may be that there is just too much other competition for viewers and we are left with the hard core baseball fans to support the World Series.”
In the same vein is this e-mail:
“You can blame Selig for a lot which is warranted but not TV viewership. Since the era of proliferation of cable channels, streaming and smart devices of all kinds, ratings of everything have changed. Big time TV shows, if there is such a thing anymore, have much smaller viewership than before. Baseball is still doing quite well in a much more highly competitive market. What networks and eventually sponsors are willing to pay to televise the World Series is a better test than Nielsen ratings. Baseball is doing very well as evidenced by its latest contract.”
One of the previous writers strayed into another area that he feels contributes to viewer decline. He calls it “the low quality of the broadcast itself.”
“Joe Buck is nails on a chalkboard to everyone I know,” he wrote. “Tim McCarver was quite possibly more offensive and the new reinforcements continue this race to the bottom of the barrel. An easy solution (a page from the past) would be to bring in the great daily broadcasters to do the job: the Vin Scullys, the Jon Millers … instead we are treated to the banality of Joe Buck and his insipid cohorts. That’s a big problem.”
One reader did not care for the Selig-inspired link between the outcome of the All-Star game and homefield advantage in the World Series.
“The All Star game and the World Series should be independent of each other,” wrote the reader, who is not related to me. “Home field in the World Series should alternate the way it was. And inter-league play is awful – it hurts the World Series, no matter how proud Bud (Bucks) Selig is.”
Then there was this from another reader:
“Not watching. Don’t care. It’s high, bye-bye, ballantine, and it can do what it wants without me. Want my baseball books? The whole business is bullshit. I don’t relate to any of them. Don’t want to watch, talk or attend. Couldn’t find them on the tube, don’t live near enough to attend, and don’t want to sit and get drunk with the fans. I don’t play the game, either.”