The Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks have provided a solid World Series matchup, with two teams with loyal fanbases getting hot at the end of the season.
National TV-wise, however, let's just say the World Series is lacking a national draw like the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers or Boston Red Sox.
Also Read: After Resurgent Regular Season, MLB Is Seeing Its Playoffs Strike Out With TV Audiences
The first three games of the so-called Fall Classic have yielded the worst TV numbers in recorded history, with each game producing smaller audiences than the last one … and all of them falling behind what had previously been the all-time low-water mark, the 2020 Game 3 pandemic “bubble” matchup between the Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays, which was also on Fox.
Consider these numbers (courtesy of Nielsen and Sports Media Watch):
Noted The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch, “The Diamondbacks and Rangers are not national draws based on historic television data outside of when they are playing a team with broad appeal or a series going long (which is what Fox has to really hope for with this series).”
The Rangers are up 2-1 over the Diamondbacks going into Tuesday night’s Game 4.
The aforementioned Sports Media Watch post has a robust history of recent-era World Series TV ratings.
Last season’s matchup between the eventual World Series champion Houston Astros and Philadelphia Phillies averaged 11.76 million viewers and didn’t have a game that came close to dipping into the single digits, total audience-wise.
Basebal’'s biggest event has had trouble in recent years competing with the juggernauts pro and college football, as well as the start of the NBA regular season.
As Sports Business Journal noted for context, the late-night Saturday college football game between Coach Deion Sanders’s media-darling Colorado Buffaloes and the Colorado State Rams back on September 16 averaged 9.3 million viewers. That was a regular-season game that finished after 2 a.m. on the East Coast.
But it’s hard to believe the national pastime has lost all its luster in just the last few years.
Just six years ago, Fox’s presentation of the 2017 World Series featuring the Astros cheating their way to a seven-game “victory” over the Dodgers averaged 18.78 million viewers, with Game 7 delivering 28.24 million watchers.
Major League Baseball enjoyed a resurgent regular season, with overall linear TV viewership up 26% through the first three months of the 2023 campaign and full-season ballpark attendance having its biggest year-over-year spike ever (9.6%) to more than 70.7 million ticket buyers.
With marquee teams including the Yankees, Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals not in the postseason, however, and the Dodgers bowing out early, numbers for the divisional and league championship series were off, leading to speculation that World Series numbers would be bad, too.
MLB may as well just stream the World Series on Friendster or whatever, because the Nielsen meters will not be kind.October 12, 2023
Few, however, could have predicted they'd be this bad.
