Shorter World Series Delivers Lower Viewership Despite Big Markets

The Red Sox going for their fourth championship in 15 years could have had an impact on poor ratingsGETTY IMAGES

Despite a World Series featuring two top baseball markets, the Red Sox-Dodgers matchup was the lowest Fall Classic audience since ’14 and fourth-lowest viewership on record. Fox averaged 14.12 million viewers for the five games this year, well below the seven-game Astros-Dodgers series last year (18.91 million viewers). Red Sox-Dodgers was even below the five-game Royals-Mets series from ’15 (14.7 million viewers). Despite the drop, the World Series continued to be a primetime winner for Fox, delivering nightly victories during each game. For the week ending Oct. 28, Fox, which also had a “TNF” telecast, was No. 1 among all nets in primetime, beating out No. 2 NBC by around 100% in viewership. Sunday night’s clinching Game 5 was the most-viewed game of the series, averaging 17.63 million viewers. The last clinching Game 5 in ’15 drew 17.21 million viewers. Game 5 also drew an average minute audience of 240,152 viewers on Fox Sports Go, marking the streaming platform’s best MLB game this season and fourth-best MLB stream on record. For the complete MLB Postseason across Fox, ESPN, TBS, MLB Network and FS1, the league averaged 5.91 million viewers for 33 games, down from 7.41 million viewers for 38 games last year. It is also the lowest mark for the playoffs since ’14, when 32 games also averaged 5.91 million viewers (Austin Karp, THE DAILY).

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MISSING THE MARK: YAHOO SPORTS’ Liz Roscher wrote Red Sox-Dodgers was “expected to pull in major ratings numbers for Fox, but it didn’t turn out that way." It "could be that the narratives of the Red Sox and Dodgers weren’t terribly compelling, with the Red Sox going for their fourth championship in 15 years, and the Dodgers struggling to end a 30-year championship drought that non-Dodgers fans can’t seem to get excited about." On top of that, the '18 MLB season as a whole was "devoid of stories that captured the attention of fans and non-fans alike." Roscher: "MLB can’t control who gets into the World Series, but it can control how it markets the sport. The only prevailing narrative from the 2018 season was that baseball is bad and broken and needs to be fixed" (SPORTS.YAHOO.com, 10/30). AWFUL ANNOUNCING's Joe Lucia wrote that while it is not "fair" to compare Red Sox-Dodgers to the last two World Series viewership numbers, the Fall Classic audience for '18 "represents a massive step back" for MLB (AWFULANNOUNCING.com, 10/29).