Low World Series TV ratings in 2023 continue 7-year downward trend

[Steve Timko]

 https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/low-world-series-tv-ratings-201430820.html

[Kevin M.]

Admittedly I’m not a baseball fan, but I didn’t know the series was going on until a student of mine mentioned it yesterday. 

On Wed, Nov 1, 2023 at 6:21 PM Steve Timko <steve...@gmail.com> wrote:

 https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/low-world-series-tv-ratings-201430820.html

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[Stan S]

Dallas versus Phoenix does not have the words “Classic Baseball Rivalry” anywhere in the title. 

MLB brought some of this on themselves with the “every team plays every team” schedule in 2023. 

-Stan

[PGage]

 I am a baseball fan, and while I knew the series was going on I barely cared. I watched most of the games the morning after, FF through major segments, and perhaps most telling, was never in jeopardy of having the final score spoiled because it seemed absolutely nobody in my social media networks cared enough to discuss the games.

MLB partly just got unlucky with two teams with low interest from the southwest with no connection to high population east coast TV markets.

I give them some credit this year. I was against the pitch clock at first, a proponent of the idea that one of the things that makes baseball unique is that it has no clock. But I was quickly won over, the clock cut a lot of the dead air out, and games were more than 20 minutes shorter than the previous year. At an average length of 2’40”, down from over 3 hours the previous season, they approached the classic period when a baseball game was usually over in less than 2 hours and 20 minutes. Far more enjoyable.

But greed still drives them to artificially inject drama into the season with too many wildcards, and too many post season games. One result is the WS was decided in freaking November, and League Championship and World Series games are competing for attention with NFL mid-season games, a competition MLB will always lose.

But it’s worse than that, WS baseball not only got beat in the TV ratings by a la luster MNF game with the Raiders, it got beat by a 60 Minutes episode.

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[Diner]

Last week I was listening to "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," and one of the guests was comedian Zainab Johnson. During the final round (Lightning Fill in the Blank), Johnson was asked to complete this sentence: "On Friday the Arizona Diamondbacks face the Texas Rangers in the first game of the 2023 BLANK."

Johnson replied "Don't even know what sport that is."

A good joke, but for a lot of people I think it rings true.

[Mark Jeffries]

Boobs, uh, tinkle, uh, Howard Cosell--oh sorry, wrong game.

Mark Jeffries
spotl...@gmail.com

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[Brad Beam]

A beneficial side effect to the early exit of the World Series for dear alma mater:

Fox has announced the promotion of Saturday night’s West Virginia-BYU conference(!?) game from FS1 to the main network.

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 2, 2023, at 10:32, Diner <bway...@gmail.com> wrote:

Last week I was listening to "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," and one of the guests was comedian Zainab Johnson. During the final round (Lightning Fill in the Blank), Johnson was asked to complete this sentence: "On Friday the Arizona Diamondbacks face the Texas Rangers in the first game of the 2023 BLANK."

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[Tom Wolper]

My hot take is that Taylor Swift needed to date one of the players to bring attention to the series. I watched the games and enjoyed them. The problem this year is an utter lack of star power. MLB has few enough players who are well known outside of their home markets and none of them were in the World Series. On top of that the games were called by Joe Davis and Jon Smoltz who were competent but unexciting. There wasn’t enough entertainment to bring in casual viewers.

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[Steve Timko]

World Series averaged 9.11 million viewers, making it the least-watched Fall Classic in TV history

https://apnews.com/article/world-series-rangers-diamondbacks-fox-f0eb9837a3d8bfa529fed811a6417057 

World Series averaged 9.11 million viewers, making it the least-watched Fall Classic in TV history