This year’s World Series had the lowest television ratings ever. It doesn’t seem logical.
Baseball’s popularity has been resurgent. Its revenues have been soaring.
Chicago is the nation’s third-largest media market. Houston is the 10th. The White Sox hadn’t won a World Series since 1917.
Sure, this year’s ratings might have edged out the Giants-Angels World Series in 2002 if the Astros had been able to extend the contest beyond four games. But the real problems run deeper.
Some sportswriters say that Bud Selig cooked the stew and now he must eat it. That is, Selig pushed baseball to introduce revenue sharing (some $300 million went from the top- to the bottom-revenue teams this year), and, they say, this has brought the game more competitive balance. The greater balance, in turn, has pushed popular and rich teams like the Yankees out of the World Series, thereby hurting the ratings.
While it is true that MLB’s revenue sharing has improved the financial fate of small-market teams, it has not yet had a mark on the game’s balance.
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Even the Chicago White Sox’s position in the nation’s
third-largest media market couldn’t boost television
ratings in their World Series sweep of the Houston Astros. |
If revenue sharing were to level the playing field, it would be because the revenue transfers lowered the top teams’ payrolls and lifted the bottom teams’ payrolls.
But this hasn’t happened. In fact, since 1997 (when the revenue-sharing system was inaugurated) and again since 2003 (when the extended sharing system was put in place), payrolls have only grown more unequal.
So, revenue sharing is not the culprit of lower TV ratings. While the causes are complex, it seems that a poor strategy by MLB is at least partly to blame.
Two elements of that strategy are the starting time of the games and the failure to adopt fan-friendly new technology.
Until 1971, all World Series games were played in the daytime. By 1975, five of the seven games were played at night. The 1987 Series had one day game — the last one.
The commissioner says that the networks insist on prime time to boost the ratings. The ratings trend since the 1980s hardly substantiates this point of view.
It is probably true that in any given year ratings will be higher in prime time than earlier in the day. But it is also true that when the games end at midnight or later on the East Coast, children do not watch. (The same is true for many working adults.)
If someone can’t watch the conclusion of the season, why watch the lesser games that determine who gets to the final contest? The children who were shut out in the 1980s and 1990s are not watching today.
My 7-year-old son, who loves baseball, wakes up in the morning and asks, “Dad, who won last night?” That’s his experience of the World Series.
Last week, he asked me, “Dad, how come you spend all that time watching the games when you can just read the papers the next day to find out who won?”
There is little mystery here. Baseball is pursuing the short-term buck at the expense of the sport’s long-term health.
How come the Super Bowl can start at 6:20 p.m. Eastern, but the World Series can’t start before 8:30 p.m.?
In addition to the Super Bowl being accessible to youngsters, the dinner-time hour has spawned a tradition of Super Bowl neighborhood parties. In our sports-crazed culture these parties practically have become as prominent as Thanksgiving dinners.
The message from the NFL is clear: Our game is important and interesting enough for all of America to watch.
And certainly Super Bowl ratings haven’t suffered from the earlier start. They exceed 40, while those of the World Series hover around 10. And the number of viewers is even more disparate, because each television attracts more viewers for the Super Bowl.
Then there’s the matter of MLB not effectively using technology to engage its audience. World Series viewers get Fox’s annoying “Scooter” graphic purporting to enlighten us about what a fastball or curveball does. Super Bowl viewers get instant replay.
Bud Selig says instant replay disrupts the flow of the game. And Fox’s pitch graphic doesn’t?
Bud Selig says instant replay makes the game longer. Doesn’t that depend on how instant replay is implemented and whether it eliminates protracted displays of managerial temper on the playing field?
Instant replay actually enriches the game. It invites the fan into the mysterious workings of umpires’ often arbitrary and wrong decision-making.
It reduces the chances that a game’s (and sometimes a series’) outcome is determined by an erroneous call. It adds a new element of decision about when to challenge an umpire.
Technology gives us the instant-replay option. It is a perfect tool for television. If baseball can have the wild card and the DH, it can have instant replay.
And even if it does end up lengthening the game by a few minutes, it is nothing that can’t be cured by an abbreviated pregame show, shorter commercial breaks or, better yet, an earlier starting time.
Andrew Zimbalist is Robert Woods professor of economics at Smith College.
