Red Sox-Dodgers through two games is down 11% from Astros-Dodgers last year.getty images
The Red Sox-Dodgers World Series is averaging 13.63 million viewers after two games, marking the lowest two-game figure for the Fall Classic since Giants-Royals in ’14. Red Sox-Dodgers is down 11% from Astros-Dodgers last year. Game 1 this year finished with 13.76 million viewers, while Game 2 on Wednesday night drew 13.46 million. Despite declines for both games, they both won primetime for Fox on their respective nights. When incorporating Fox Deportes and Fox Sports Go viewership, those figures rise to 14.34 million and 14.09 million viewers, respectively. Both Games 1 and 2 saw big gains on streaming. Game 1 had an average minute audience of 210,208 viewers on Fox Sports Go, which is the platform’s fourth-best MLB audience yet. The top MLB stream remains Cubs-Indians World Series Game 7 in ’16 (365,000), followed by last year’s Astros-Dodgers Games 7 and 6 (294,000 and 244,000, respectively. Game 2 this year (191,097) ranks No. 5 on that list (Austin Karp, THE DAILY).
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WORLD SERIES AVERAGE VIEWERSHIP THROUGH TWO GAMES ON FOX
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YEAR
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MATCHUP
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TWO-GAME AVERAGE (000)
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'18
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Red Sox-Dodgers
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13,625
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'17
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Astros-Dodgers
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15,305
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'16
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Cubs-Indians
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18,329
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'15
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Royals-Mets
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14,485
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'14
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Giants-Royals
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12,549
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THE 1 TO WATCH? FS1 aired all but one game of the seven-game Dodgers-Brewers NLCS (Game 2 aired on Fox), and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said the league would "always prefer to have the broadcast outlet that gives us the broadest possible audience." However, he noted Fox, as part of its current rights deal, "had the right" to air games on its cable outlet. Manfred: "We made that deal and we're gonna live up to it. That was part of the deal. We knew that was a possibility when the deal was struck" (BOSTON GLOBE, 10/25).
MAKING A COMEBACK: In N.Y., Justin Terranova notes as part of the massive '17 layoffs at ESPN, the net "decided to shelve 'Baseball Tonight' except as a lead-in to 'Sunday Night Baseball.'" ESPN's Karl Ravech, one of the net's main MLB hosts, said, "I am terribly disappointed in the amount of shows and programming that we do and I miss doing it, but during the World Series we take over center stage and provide the content for ESPN." Terranova notes ESPN this season saw a 15% ratings boost for "Baseball Tonight." Ravech said, "I have brought it to the attention of everyone in the company that'll listen about the show's growth and we should probably in my mind be doing more baseball and there is an appetite for it. I never understood why we ceded the property. It was such a wildly popular program and television today is about niche programming anyway" (N.Y. POST, 10/26).
