People complain about sports networks favoring teams from big east coast cities, but it’s not unreasonable that they do given that every time teams from large east coast cities are in the World Series, the ratings spike.
Fox just announced that Game 1 posted a 10.5/18 overnight household rating, which is a 31% increase over last year’s Giants-Royals Game 1. Indeed, it was the best rating for Game 1 of the World Series since 2009. Which just so happened to be the last time a New York team was in the series. And a Philly team to boot. Not that this was purely a New York-driven thing. Kansas City’s local rating for the game was a 57.3, which is the highest single-market Game 1 rating since at least 1996.
Fox further notes that the game’s rating was the network’s best performance for programming of any kind on a Tuesday night since February 2012. Which shows you why networks still pay a ton for baseball rights even if they don’t sniff football ratings or the ratings baseball itself used to get back in the day. Programming is programming and baseball delivers.
Not too bad for a dying sport. And imagine how good the ratings would’ve been if they never fixed their technical glitch and viewers were treated to Matt Vasgersian and John Smoltz instead of Joe Buck, Harold Reynolds and Tom Verducci.
