All-Star Ratings Explained and Stadium Situations Spelled Out
Three-Dot Friday 7.18
Sure, it was the second-lowest watched MLB All-Star game… but it was still the most-watched thing on Fox since the Super Bowl. That tells you more about the state of broadcast television than the state of baseball viewership…
Look, in 1998 “Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place,” which you have completely forgotten about even if you ever knew about it in the first place, averaged 12 million viewers an episode on ABC. This year, seven-and-a-half million people watched the All-Star game, and it was the highest viewed thing on Fox since February.
As I keep saying, you can’t look at the old baseball teevee numbers without also looking at the old broadcast teevee numbers before cable and the internet and what have you. The World Series used to draw 30 million people a game, sure. “All In the Family” used to average 30 million viewers over a 30-episode season on Saturday nights. Things have changed…
(It’s also the most-watched All-Star game out of all of them, not like that means a whole lot.)
The newest plan to separate people from their money is adding “Uno” at casinos. Imagine having $10k on the line and you keep getting hit with “Skip” for half an hour… The thing I keep looking for is that I was told certain casinos had “War,” and you could play by-the-card. Now THAT I’d do…
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver again said this week that expansion is on the table, but they’re just in the beginning stages. As I’ve said for a while now, they are just waiting for Lebron to retire. I’m convinced he’s going to end up being the most visible partner in the inevitable Las Vegas team and since active players can’t have ownership stakes, he can’t even be part of the conversation right now. Watch how fast expansion gets moving once he hangs ‘em up for good…
(With Kevin Durant a predictable part-owner of the new Seattle team. Where will Steph end up? Probably as part-owner of the team he currently plays for…)
For the first time, a major league franchise has completely dumped their teevee broadcast announcers and will do the much cheaper simulcast with their radio team. This is always a good idea in theory but terrible in practice. The St. Louis Blues are going to be the first to find this out…
MLB announced that if the Tampa Bay Rays make the playoffs, then they will in fact host any home games at their temporary home, the New York Yankees spring training facility of Steinbrenner Field. There had been plenty of talk before the season that with two teams playing in minor league ballparks, they might move their home playoff games elsewhere. For now, that won’t be the case.
The underlying note here is that Tampa is a game-and-a-half out of the final playoff spot, but will now play an absurd number of away games the next couple months because they front-loaded the home schedule to avoid as much of the Florida summer as they could- they have eight home games in August. If they can get through that, then maybe the playoff question would be revisited…
As for the other team playing in a minor league park this season? I think it’s pretty safe to say the whole playoff game thing isn’t a concern…
However, MLB teams used to never think of home field advantage in the playoffs as a thing. When the Boston Braves made their “Miracle” run in 1914, they used new Fenway Park (built in 1912) as their home stadium in the World Series instead of their old ballpark because of the increased seating capacity.
That World Series run caused the Braves to build their own new ballpark in time for the 1915 season, so when the Red Sox won the 1915 AL Pennant, where did they play their World Series “home games” to get more attendance and therefore more money? Why, Braves Field, of course, even though their own park was only three years old! And when they repeated in 1916, they used Braves Field again! And they won the Series both years, so it didn’t seem to make that much of a difference. Besides, since there were only eight teams in each league and no interleague play, the NL teams actually had more experience playing at Braves Field than the Red Sox did.
(Oh, did 1916 in baseball get mentioned again? Huh. Guess I’d better mention my book on the 1916 New York Giants and their still-record 26-game win streak is still available and it touches on everything that happened in 1916 in baseball and sports.)
The White Sox called up top prospect Colson Montogomery before the all-star break, and he made an incredible catch in his debut… but more curiously, in his first plate appearance he reached on catcher’s interference, becoming the first player to do that since 1943…
Damian Lillard re-signing with the Portland Trail Blazers looks like a real nice reunion, especially since he’s going to be rehabbing from his ACL tear all next season… but it’s also a sneaky way to allow the Blazers to be bad again without trying…
Why? Well, Lillard’s contact counts against the salary cap even though he’s not playing. So they’re able to spend enough to get to the cap “floor” without having a good player out there, and they could even probably figure out a way to not put him on a full-season injury list by pretending he might come back late in the season and not even have to fill the roster spot at all…
The new Kansas Jayhawks football stadium looks pretty good. You know when something looks almost exactly the same as the renderings, they have not spared the expenses. The coolest thing they’ve revealed so far are the new end zones waving the wheat.
For the uninitiated, after a KU player scores a touchdown, the fans “Wave the Wheat,” making the stadium look like a Kansas wheat field in the breeze. Now the end zone is also doing that, an exceptionally nice touch…
Will KU football games get more than 7.5 million teevee viewers a game? Probably not. But last year’s Michigan-Ohio State game was the least watched of that rivalry in seven years… and still drew 12.3 million. On a Saturday. On broadcast teevee…
I believe you, but please elaborate on WHY simulcasting the radio broadcasters is bad?