2023 World Series TV Rating

As Olbermann has noted, the reason it's 'concerning' is the country is 30% bigger now than it was on Oct. 27, 1986 - when the MNF game pulled an 8.8 rating compared to Game 7's 38.9 rating.

Baseball never needed an "October Madness" - this was always supposed to be about gathering the best teams and settling it there and then. That's what the 162-game schedule is supposed to be for, sorting out wheat from chaff.

 

Why does baseball get slagged for this, but the NBA (and NHL), which stretches out single series over two weeks, and whose playoffs take literally two months-plus to complete, and which often has 9 or 10 p.m. tipoffs, gets largely spared?

Never made any sense to me. Baseball is a longer game, but NBA playoff games can really drag out too with reviews, timeouts, etc.

I will admit my baseball playoff interest wanes when my own team is out, but that's a different phenomenon at work. That's a putting all my eggs in one basket emotional thing and I'm the same way with the NBA and NFL.

When my team doesn't make the playoffs, I'm more inclined to follow generally.

 

When I see the network execs stop waving money around, I'll get a little more concerned. Pretty much all that matters.

 

Makes no difference to a baseball fan, I agree. But Fox can't be happy today. The figures were about as bad as they could be and so were most of the games.

 

The question isn't so much how the ratings compare to football, but how do they compare to the Masked Singer, the screaming chef, the other singing shows, the Sunday animation or whatever else Fox would have been airing at the time?

At least I knew where to find the World Series games. In the earlier rounds I had to go through the mental rolodex of Fox, FS1, TBS (or was it TNT?) and ESPN to try and find the games.

 

Agree with pretty much all of this. Another thing is that it's hard to come up with a better sport for gambling than football.

 

More importantly, why is this thread in the Journo sub board?

 

No doubt. Baseball is a prop bet paradise, if you so choose it to be so, but who in the hell would want to bet on outcomes for such a random-ass sport? (Besides degenerates.)

I can’t imagine even wanting to try to pull off a baseball parlay in the same way I might for football or basketball.

 

The World Series would have finished about 14th in the 2022-2023 season if it were classified as a series.

https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/mo...-2023-season-yellowstone-football-1235623612/

 

Quite frankly I'm stunned that Survivor is still pulling top-20 numbers in this day and age.

 

That is a reflection of how much network television audiences for dramas have declined. Dramas are moving to streaming. For example, CBS/Paramount started Yellowstone on streaming and now shows reruns on CBS. Networks are scrambling for cheap programming. Survivor is cheap to produce and had a loyal audience.

That is why CBS/Paramount was just put up for sale.

 

In additional to the macro issues with the sport, this series really lacked stars. If you asked casual baseball fans to name players outside their home market, they would likely start with Shohei Ohtani and go on to maybe Aaron Judge or Mike Trout or Jose Altuve or Ronald Acuna....and few would ever get to Corey Seager or Marcus Semien or Corbin Carroll. The player with the highest recognizability was probably Max Scherzer, and he only put up a few innings before being hurt.