Fox on Friday (October 27) takes the field for its coverage of baseball’s World Series, featuring a pair of surprise teams in the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers.
Fox hopes the series will continue the ratings momentum built by the League Championship Series, which averaged 5.19 million viewers across two seven-game series — up 6% from last year’s 4.8 million viewers. Game 7 of the Diamonbacks-Philadelphia Phillies National League Championship Series on October 24 averaged 8.9 million viewers across TBS and truTV, the most-watched game of either series.
Multichannel News caught up with Fox Sports lead Major League Baseball director Matt Gangl and president, insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill ahead of Game 1 to discuss Fox Sports’s strategy in producing this year’s Fall Classic.
MCN: How will Fox Sports tailor its World Series coverage with two teams that are not particularly well-known to casual baseball fans?
Matt Gangl: I wouldn't say it changes our strategy, but maybe it changes a little bit from the point of how we cover the teams. The teams may not be as known across baseball as much as if you had the Dodgers or the Yankees in the World Series, but we're still covering baseball at a high level. A lot of fans embrace the underdog, and you have two teams that two seasons ago lost over 100 games and now are playing for the title. I think that gives a lot of fans of other teams a sense of hope moving forward that their team can someday end up in the World Series. The [Diamondbacks and Rangers] are playing their best baseball at the right time. They both started out hot in the first half of the season before faltering a little bit through the second half, but have fought their way to play for the biggest prize. Our job is to make sure that the teams and the players in the series become recognizable faces by telling their stories. Part of our task is trying to bring that to the average baseball viewer who may not know anything about them.
MCN: Has Fox tempered viewership expectations given the lack of a big-market team?
Mike Mulvihill: The approach for us from a business perspective doesn’t change much. We come to the World Series every year with the same expectations and hopes — that the games will outrate everything on television except the NFL, and that the series will go as long as possible. We root for volume more than we root for matchup, so if we can get to a Game 6, or Game 7, that's more important to us than whatever the matchup might be. We feel like what we’re signing up for is basically 20 hours of primetime TV that's going to rate at the level of the number one show on television outside of the NFL, whether it's Yankees-Dodgers, or Rangers-Dbacks. That expectation doesn’t change at all.
MCN: Have this year’s rules changes forced you to alter how you produce the games this year, as opposed to prior World Series?
MG: It just makes everything more condensed, which is obviously great for the time and pace of the game. The pace will be quicker and there will be less dead time without guys constantly backing out of the [batter’s] box and pitchers wandering around the mound. It’s made us a little more focused on maybe getting to replays a little sooner because you can't get as much in due to the pace of the game. For me, it’s about getting the best three or four shots in. So it's about trying to be a little more selective and trying to make sure there's a little sense of urgency getting to certain things as well.
MCN: Will Fox look to feature any new technological wrinkles in its World Series coverage?
MG: We have two new technical things. We’ll feature the umpire cam during the series — we’ve had it during our regular-season telecasts, but this will be the first time we’ve had in the World Series. It will give people a front-row view of what it’s like to face pitching in the 2020s. The other thing is that we are going to do is something we did in the All-Star game and feature a live drone inside the stadium that can be in over the field during dead-ball moments. When there is a stoppage in play, whether that's during a home run, the end of a half inning or a pitching change, we'll have a drone that would be over the field that can follow the players as they run around the bases for a home run and those types of things.
