Baseball can’t out-FOX reality when it comes to ratings
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
The real kick in the pants, though, is not that San Francisco’s 3-1 victory over Texas in Game 5 Monday couldn’t top “Dancing With The Stars” in the TV ratings, but that FOX and Major League Baseball are actually bragging about beating a regular-season football game instead of addressing the fact that this year’s showdown between the Rangers and Giants tied 2008 (Tampa Bay vs. Philadelphia) for the lowest-rated World Series in baseball history.
While realizing football has unofficially supplanted baseball as the national pastime, the potential finale of baseball’s championship series should draw more interest among the common fan than a regular-season NFL game in November, therefore this supposed “victory” is nothing to write a press release about, yet that didn’t stop FOX from tooting its own horn for three consecutive days this past weekend.
Network executives thumped their chests over what they considered an “impressive” 9.0 rating (15.5 million viewers) Sunday night while ignoring the fact that Game 4 of the World Series actually lost out to NBC’s broadcast of Sunday Night Football between New Orleans and Pittsburgh. A day later, FOX sent out a release calling the World Series a “prime time force” – a laughable attempt at positive spin amidst a slew of stories in which we learned that the ratings from this year’s series actually dropped 28 percent from last year when the Yankees beat the Phillies.
To those who think the Yankees have ruined baseball with their continuous success, let the record show that the ’09 World Series drew baseball’s highest rating since 2004 when Boston beat St. Louis, proving once again that big-market teams make the world go ‘round.
The numbers don’t lie, but network executives do. And if they’re not lying, they’re twisting the truth while conveniently omitting significant data that would otherwise sink their vapid theories. FOX is basing its bombastic analysis of the 2010 World Series on how poorly the ratings were in 2008 – as if last year’s spike in viewership never happened – and they’re doing it by plucking deceptive numbers from a superfluous pile of incriminating evidence.
The crux of their argument is that this year’s series averaged more viewers (14.3 million) than the 2008 series (13.6), which is technically true, but what they fail to tell you is that increase is due in large part to the fact there are now more homes in America than there were two years ago, which means more televisions, too.
If you want an accurate depiction on how well an annual sporting event does in the Nielsen ratings, forget average viewers. The only numbers that matter are the actual ratings points and share, which were both terrible. This year’s 8.4 rating matched the 2008 World Series for the lowest rating of all-time. What this means is that 8.4 percent of all television-equipped households were tuned in to the World Series at any given moment. The 14 share this year’s series drew means that 14 percent of households watching TV were tuned into the World Series during that time slot.
The first lesson in all of this is to ignore everything the networks want you to believe. FOX spent the past few days boasting its stature as the highest-rated network between Oct. 25 and 31, which basically means that because it had the rights to the World Series for a few days, it had something to differentiate itself between all the other networks airing a slew of trashy reality shows.
Even nightly ratings can be skewed, too, depending on which time slot you evaluate. Game 2 of the World Series last Thursday dominated from 8 to 9 p.m. when there was nothing else on TV worth watching, but once “CSI” kicked in at 9 and “The Mentalist” began at 10, the ratings points for the game dropped considerably each hour. In other words, 12.82 percent of American homes with TVs kept the World Series on for about an hour until the show they really wanted to watch came on.
To avoid any further confusion, all you need to know is that more people watched when the Yankees were in the World Series last season, yet people still celebrated this year when Texas eliminated the defending champs in the ALCS, and then subsequently stopped watching baseball once the World Series began.
What we’ve learned from all this is that Americans only like underdogs when the underdog has an overwhelming favorite staring it in the face. Two underdogs equal lousy ratings. No one wants to watch a bunch of good guys face another bunch of good guys.
You need villains, or else you have nothing to work with, no matter how loudly you whistle past the graveyard. The bottom line is baseball has problems when the big-market teams bite the dust, and not even Kurt Warner can tap dance around that.
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