World Series 2019 – A TV Ratings Hit?
The World Series is the highlight of the baseball season and decides which team gets to take the glory of being crowned champion for another year. The playoff stages of the major sports in the United States typically attract significant numbers of people to watch them on TV. Perhaps the biggest of these is the Super Bowl, which attracts around 100 million viewers, accounting for almost a third of the entire population.
The World Series
The World Series was fought between the Houston Astros and the Washington Nationals. The Astros made it to the Series after beating the New York Yankees in the League Championship Series, despite the Yankees being the moneyline favourites. Meanwhile, the Nationals made it into the World Series as a wild card, beating the Brewers, the Dodgers, and the Cardinals. This made the Nationals only the seventh wild card team to win the World Series since the system was introduced in 1994.
A Local Hit
Understandably, the biggest TV audiences for Game Seven of the World Series were in Texas and Washington. In the latter, over one third of all TV-owning households were watching the game. When you look only at the TV sets that were turned on at the time, over 50% of them were watching the World Series. When looking at the peak period between 11:45 pm and midnight, these two figures go up to 39.2% and 74%, respectively.
The game did equally well in Houston, with a viewership share of 63% of all active TVs and 42.7% of all TV-owning households.
By way of comparison, the previous record for a Nationals baseball game was set in Game Two of the World Series, with 24% of all TVs in the Washington area tuned in. Prior to this World Series, the record had been 16.7% during a regular season game in 2012 against the St. Louis Cardinals.
A National Flop
It is perhaps not a surprise that a game will attract many viewers from the areas that the teams come from. However, the true success of a game should be measured on its performance nationally.
Across the United States 23 million people tuned in to watch Game Seven of the World Series — the lowest amount in the last 10 years. Although not a direct comparison, this number represents just a quarter of what the Super Bowl typically attracts.
Twenty-three million is not a catastrophic number, though. While it is the lowest number of viewers for Game Seven in the World Series, the 2014 game between the Giants and Royals attracted only 500,000 more, and the Cards-Rangers match in 2011 had 25.4 million people tuning in. The 2016 Game Seven is the only one in the last 10 years to go over 30 million, with more than 40 million people watching.
A Trend?
These low viewing figures are not an anomaly. TV ratings are dropping in all major sports. Even the Super Bowl, which had regularly attracted over 100 million viewers in the US, dipped (ever so slightly) below this in 2019 with 99 million. The Detroit Tigers saw a 14.6% drop in TV ratings in 2019, contributing to the 76.5% drop over the last six years. The overall trend for MLB viewership is also downwards, with figures down 4% in the first half of 2019. There are individual teams that are seeing increases due to improved performance, which attracts local fans to tune in more regularly; however, these accomplishments do not offset the overall decrease.
Prognosis?
Overall, MLB viewing figures are down. This is not isolated to baseball—the NFL and the NBA have seen their TV ratings decline, too. Outside of the US, Formula 1 has seen drops in viewing figures, but the English Premier League has seen a recent spike in viewing figures after a downward trend (although this is partially attributed to a crackdown on illegal streaming services).
Sports leagues like MLB, the NFL, and the NBA are beginning to target fans outside of the United States in an attempt to offset the drop in demand from within their domestic markets. They are also attempting to use the eSports phenomenon as a way to entice younger audiences to follow their sports, although it is too early to tell how successful these two strategies will be. The drops in viewing figures are by no means catastrophic, but they are not what the leagues want.
Main Photo
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