World Series Striking Out in Early TV Ratings
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The World Series has been an offensive showcase in its first two games, full of homers, big hits, and big numbers — except on television.
Fox Sports said on Tuesday total viewership for the first two games of this year’s contest between the Anaheim Angels and the San Francisco Giants was down 13 percent from 2001’s series between the New York Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks, according to Nielsen Media Research statistics.
In fact, the first two games, played on Saturday and Sunday, drew lower ratings than the first two games in the 2000 series, a four-game sweep by the New York Yankees over the New York Mets that was Nielsen’s lowest-rated series in history.
This year’s first two games drew 17.5 million average viewers compared with 20.1 million a year earlier.
Game One’s rating, a measure of the percentage of homes with TVs that watched the game, was down 10 percent from 2001’s Game One. Game Two was down 21 percent from the 2001 Game Two on the same basis.
The all-California series — which opened at Edison International Field in Anaheim, California, near Los Angeles — has performed strongly among viewers in the western United States, but is down year-over-year in the Midwest and mountain states and is off a full 25 percent in the Eastern time zone compared with last year.
Fox, which paid $2.5 billion in 2000 for six years of baseball broadcasting rights, had been hoping to at least to break even with last year’s results.
Fox Sports President and Executive Producer Ed Goren had said last week that the network’s best-case scenario for this year’s series would be to break even compared to last year’s matchup.
Excluding the World Series, Fox’s overall baseball ratings for the four divisional series and two league championship series this year were up 5 percent over 2001.
Fox also said it had won the nightly prime-time competition both Saturday and Sunday nights in total viewers and adults aged 18-49, a key demographic for advertisers.
Both of the first two games were close, with San Francisco edging Anaheim 4-3 in Game One and Anaheim powering out an 11-10 victory over the Giants in Game Two. Oddsmakers had San Francisco as a slight favorite to take Game Three, scheduled for Tuesday evening in San Francisco’s Pac Bell Stadium.
Fox and Fox Sports are units of News Corp. Ltd.
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