It’s time to get a little esoteric. We’ll call it a statistical deep dive. While much has been made about the decline of baseball, a little digging into World Series ratings tells a story that’s, let’s say, complicated—okay, very complicated.
The Basics
To get the most out of what follows, here are a few key terms to know.
Rating
The percent of US households with a television that watched a certain event.
Share
The percent of televisions in use at a given time that were tuned in to a certain event.
Viewership
The average number of people who watched a certain event throughout the duration of that event.
World Series Numbers
It’s no secret that when it comes to the World Series, all three of the above variables have experienced a rather impressive downward trajectory. Here is a graph, courtesy Wikipedia, that leaves little doubt regarding trends over the past four decades.
To highlight a few numbers, the 1978 World Series between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers averaged a rating of 32.8 and a share of 56 over the course of six games, tied for highest with the proceedings between the Philadelphia Phillies and Kansas City Royals in 1980.
In comparison, the 2020 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays averaged a 5.2 rating and 12 share, also over the course of six games.
In terms of viewership (which doesn’t exactly follow rating as the population of the country grows), game seven of the 1986 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and New York Mets set a record with somewhere between 55 – 60 million viewers. On the opposite end of the spectrum, game three of the 2023 event had a mere 8.126 million viewers, the most anemic figure since such numbers have been tracked.
In other words, no matter which way you break things down, the slope of the line is unequivocally negative.
Pretty simple.
The Dig
Now for the complexity.
Television ratings are provided by a company called Nielsen Media Research, hence the commonly used term Nielsen ratings. These ratings have been criticized for a variety of reasons, including their sampling of only those who’ve agreed to be tracked, inaccuracies in measuring out-of-home audiences, and delays in accounting for on-demand viewing.
The most modern criticism revolves around the fact that current content consumption occurs via numerous types of devices, and methodology that emphasizes television viewership (traditional and streaming) might paint an incomplete picture.
With regards to this latter complaint, it’s safe to say that the drop in World Series ratings might be slightly less dramatic if viewing across all devices is reliably captured. That said, it’s also safe to say that accounting for alternate means of viewing would move the needle by fractions of a point. In other words, baseball needs another excuse.
That’s where cultural fragmentation enters the picture. Minus the NFL, essentially all entities that previously dominated the ratings have suffered with the introduction of countless entertainment options (as opposed to the three channels that comprised the scene several decades ago).
And from there, the question becomes whether baseball has suffered disproportionately.
In 1991, The Tonight Show averaged in the range of 6.5 million viewers per night. In recent times, viewership has been known to dip under one million. (Granted, hosts have changed and other similar shows have absorbed some of that volume, but the proportional drop is in keeping with that seen by baseball.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, shows like All in the Family, Dallas, and The Cosby Show could pull in ratings well into the 30s. In more recent times, Sunday Night Football rules primetime programming with a rating of around 10. And subtracting out the behemoth that is the NFL, you’re left with immensely popular shows like Yellowstone that see ratings in the low single digits, again yielding a drop that mirrors the slide of the national pastime.
The relatively paltry viewership numbers posted by the World Series (around 11 million viewers per game) still trump the average viewership of all primetime programs, aside from, of course, the NFL and an occasional marquee event such as the NBA finals. And in the case of the NBA, depending on the year, baseball can still end up on top. (Though if you want to get picky, you could argue that the NBA hasn’t fallen as hard, with peak viewership of the finals only dropping from 29 million in 1998 to the 10-12 million range now.)
Taken together, the World Series is doing rather well, at least by the fractured standards of the 21st century. In fact, in the markets of the two teams involved, ratings can still easily find themselves in the 20s and 30s.
Clearly, there’s money to be made off the back of baseball, explaining why Fox spent $5.1 billion for the rights to broadcast the World Series (and other games) from 2022 – 2028. The network clearly understands that while ratings can’t match those of a bygone era, they will still dwarf the competition, ensuring a healthy stream of advertising revenue.
So what’s the bottom line regarding World Series ratings? Eh, whatever. Who watches baseball anyway?
