A bicoastal goldmine that has eluded Major League Baseball since 1981 and Fox Sports since the broadcasting behemoth televised its first World Series in 1996, it is a ratings jackpot that has been in the making for more than 40 years.
Yankees vs. Dodgers. New York versus L.A.
And probably a year off from the almost yearly postmortems that the USA just saw the lowest-rated World Series ever.
A year ago, the Arizona Diamondbacks vs. Texas Rangers series averaged barely 9.11 million viewers throughout the course of the five-game series, setting a new low that was worse than the 2020 Series played at a neutral location during the pandemic’s peak.
Baseball now receives the contest that best reflected the height of the sport’s appeal.
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The second consecutive Dodgers-Yankees series drew a record 44.2 million viewers on average in 1978, with a 32.8 rating that almost quadrupled the 2023 series’ 4.7 rating. Over 41 million people watched the Dodgers’ six-game revenge game against the Yankees three years later.
Of course, in the forty-three years since then, a lot has changed.
There are now four over-the-air networks instead of only three. The viewership was stratified after cable television dominated the airwaves. The once-ubiquitous cable box was marginalized and cut into bite-sized bits by streaming.
The World Series is no longer broadcast on the revered Sunday night airwaves because of the NFL’s expansion and desire for worldwide dominance, which now commands attention three times a week in the fall.
The Bronx vs. the Beach, Aaron Judge and Juan Soto vs. Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts, however, is a gift that the baseball industry has been waiting forty years for.
It’s about to discover how good it can become in this atomized landscape, for better or worse.
Dennis Deninger, an emeritus professor of sport management at Syracuse University and the author of Live Sports Media: The What, How, and Why of Sports Broadcasting, says, “They must be jumping for joy, getting the top two markets and such a great rivalry, going back to their first World Series in 1941.”
“The stars are also significant. You have large markets, a history of animosity between these two teams, and well-known players.
Deninger makes significant predictions based on the appetizer: Game 1 of the Dodgers vs. Mets National League Championship Series garnered an average of 8.26 million viewers, the highest number for an NLCS since 2009 and on par with the World Series attendance from the previous year.
Even though Sunday Night Football’s 15.4 million viewers nearly matched the baseball playoff game’s viewership, SNF lost 8% of its audience year over year in the NLCS Game 1 matchup.
For the World Series?
With the more revered Yankees replacing the Mets and no NFL meddling, it’s the two biggest markets once more. Additionally, Deninger forecasts that the average viewership will be about 16 million, the most for a World Series since the average of 18.9 million for the 2017 Dodgers-Houston Astros seven-game series.
It would be a clever turn around after four years in a row with World Series ratings that all ended up being among the lowest in history. And MLB has recently made some strides in that direction.
The children remain in the image.
TV ratings were king at the time, and the once popular national pastime has always struggled with the existential dilemma of an aging fan base.
Medicare is now available to those sought-after 18–34 viewers from the 1980s, and their offspring and grandkids were born into a maze of entertainment alternatives and social media diversions.
However, it appears that the league’s vigorous attempts to speed up and deliver a more visually appealing game are paying off.
According to someone knowledgeable with the 2024 postseason ratings, Fox Sports, which broadcasts the NL Division Series and NLCS, has seen a 39% increase in viewership among the 18- to 34-year-old demographic going into the World Series.
They were not permitted to discuss viewership numbers in public, so they spoke to USA TODAY Sports under the condition of anonymity.
That increase follows double-digit increases for almost all of MLB’s broadcast partners in the 18- to 34-year-old age range (Fox was at 9%).
MLB revealed at the end of the season that the median age of ticket purchasers has dropped from 51 to 46 since 2019, during which time the proportion of ticket purchasers between the ages of 18 and 35 has increased by 8.5%.
It makes sense that a younger, more distracted audience might connect more with a sporting event that averaged 2 hours, 38 minutes this year – down from 3:11 as recently as 2021. The league attributes the increases to its pitch clock and lax base-stealing regulations, but there are a number of other factors as well, chief among them being that it is several years removed from the pandemic’s peak.
