Three-Dot Friday 11.3

Baseball ratings suck? So does everything else.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

The “baseball is dead” people had a field day with the recently-concluded 2023 World Series, where the Texas Rangers won their first title over the Arizona Diamondbacks (and Bruce Bochy won his fourth crown as manager, tying him with Joe Torre for the most in the wild-card era). The headlines throughout the series were that it was the lowest-watched Series in history averaging 9.11 million viewers per game, and that ratings were about 4.5 overall, and that’s down 23% compared to last year between the Astros and Phillies, and so on and so forth.

But if you bothered to go beyond the headline on the obituary, let me take you to paragraph 12, after all the doom and gloom. Here it is in its entirety:

“The World Series also continues to outperform every entertainment program. This was the eighth straight year that has happened."

So… baseball is dead, but it’s still a bigger draw than anything besides football?

Uh, yeah.

People like to compare World Series ratings to “back in the day,” the 1970’s, when about 40 million people watched. The five highest-rated Series were 1978-’82, with 1978 (Yankee-Dodgers, the rematch) being the highest at over 44 million viewers.

The problem is, the “baseball is dead” people don’t compare any other teevee ratings to the 70’s. It’s only baseball. You know as well as I do what has happened since then. Teevee options went from three networks, an independent channel (I was lucky, I had at least five independents, all hail KOFY TV 20 and Sausalito legend Jim Gabbert) and public teevee- that’s four to 10 choices, if you’re lucky, to literally anything you can stream on your phone. Viewing options have splintered so hard that every rating has gone down.

So let’s compare apples to apples, shall we?

Let’s take the way-back-machine to 1971, the first year a World Series game was played at night. It was game four at then shiny-and-new Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh and they beat the Orioles 4-3, en route to winning in seven. (The game, by the way, was October 13th and not sometime in mid-November.) This, not coincidentally, happened the year after Monday Night Nootball premiered and basically kick-started the switch in sporting events from being held in the daytime, which is more convenient for fans, to nighttime, which is better for teevee viewership. 

The game was wild success. While the Baseball Hall of Fame article on the contest claims some 63 million watched, the measured number was somewhere closer to 40. Since bars and other outside-the-home “group gatherings” don’t count in the ratings, it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

The 1971 World Series rating was overall a 27.6. “Rating” is the percentage of total number of teevees available, while “share” is the percentage of sets that are on and tuned to that program. I still confused by the two and I work in teevee. Anyway, it means that 27.6% of the total number of teevee sets in America watched the 1971 World Series.

From 27.6 to 4.5-or-so for this year looks pretty bad, huh?

Until you compare apples to apples, and 1971 teevee ratings to 2023 teevee ratings.

The top-rated show in the 1971-’72 season was “All In The Family.” You may remember the show, or you may have seen clips. It was innovate, fresh and thought-provoking back when network teevee tried. Anyway, it was a sitcom (officially) that aired on CBS on Saturday nights, which is now the lowest rated week for scripted programming (it’s why so many networks put sports on Saturday night). And it’s average rating for the year was 34.0. That’s right. 34% of all teevees in America watched “All In The Family” on Saturday nights. It averaged about 21.1 million viewers.

Do you know what the highest-watched scripted network show was last year? It was old reliable, NCIS. I can’t find the ratings points so we’re going with average viewership. It averaged 9.86 million.

So baseball is dead, and it averages 9.1 million viewers a game, and NCIS leads all networks with 9.86 million.

And you’re going to sit there and tell me the problem is baseball.

Buddy, you’ve been watching too much teevee.