Early last Thursday morning, as the champagne flew in the Chicago Cubs clubhouse, Fox put to bed a rollicking World Series that smashed all expectations of what modern baseball can do on television with a 25.2 rating for Game 7. Later that night, on the NFL Network, the Atlanta Falcons clobbered the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and drew a once-unfathomable 3.2 rating, a 35% drop from the same Thursday night game last year. While in other years, the Falcons and Bucs game might have been written off as an anomaly, it was yet another example of how the NFL’s once-booming ratings have been crashing all season.
And it raised an interesting question: If the NFL’s ratings are falling this fast can baseball build off the popularity of this year’s Chicago-Cleveland World Series and challenge football’s timeworn television dominance?
The answer is actually pretty simple.
Not a chance.
“This World Series won’t be a trend-setter, it will be a blip,” says Michael Haupert, a baseball researcher and professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin LaCrosse. “This World Series had the Cubs winning the World Series for the first time in 108 years. Even if the Cubs go back to the World Series it won’t be the same.”
It was, in other words, a once-in-a-lifetime moment for much of a country that had come to embrace the plight of a team whose misfortune had been broadcast for years on nationwide cable super channel WGN in Chicago. There will only be one Cubs first World Series win in more than a century and there will only be so much tolerance a country will have for four-hour games with mid-inning pitching changes and rain delays. All anyone has to do is look back at the last six World Series which almost never had games break a rating of 10 and dipped as low as 6.1 to realize the game is not on a popularity upswing. Even with the 40m viewers who tuned in for last week’s Game 7.
“I hate the phrase ‘perfect storm’ but this was a ‘perfect storm,’” says Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University and one of the country’s top media analysts. “You had the final game, an improbable home run, a blown lead and a 17-minute rain delay. To suggest the great American pastime which hasn’t been the great American pastime for a long time will come back because of one World Series is hard to do. I don’t think next year we will see 40m people watching the World Series.”
Still it’s remarkable the question is even being asked. For decades football has been the American sports ratings champion having passed baseball in the early 1970s and then skyrocketing to extraordinary numbers. The last six Super Bowls have each drawn more than 100m viewers and weekly ratings were always robust through last season, drawing primetime audiences for even lackluster games that rivaled and often exceeded those for the World Series. Then came this NFL season and a mysterious sea of minuses beside the ratings numbers that show a drop of around 12 percent and no real explanation as to why.
There have been many guesses with much focus turning to the overall decline of people watching televison and a glut of primetime NFL games that mean the league has regular single-game windows three times a week and sometimes four if you add in Sunday morning London games. This means there are too many open slots for what are billed as “special” games but often wind up featuring two unexciting teams mired at the bottom of the standings. Perhaps, many wonder, if football has hit their ceiling.
“I always thought we were getting to that point,” Thompson says. “When I was young in the (1960s) you could watch every sporting event on television and raise a family and keep a job. There is no way to do that today.”
Ever since ESPN’s rise in the 1980s and also that of regional cable networks, he has been expecting sports fans to throw up their hands and scream: “Enough.”
“But until now, especially with the NFL, that never happened,” he says. “I think part of it is people have lots more choices.”
Neither Thompson nor Haupert are ready to give up on football. The audience for Sunday night’s Oakland-Denver game might be down 24% from the same Sunday last year and yet it still drew 18m viewers. There is no way a regular season Sunday night baseball game will draw anywhere near that. The decisive Game 5 of last year’s World Series, played on a Sunday night, got just 17m viewers.
Football was always the perfect television sport mixing a controlled violence with athleticism with games that are played in a finite time on a field that provided for multiple camera angles. The short schedule and week between games allows for drama to build and storylines to emerge. No other major American sport offers these ingredients. Especially baseball, whose games last well over three hours and many times more than four.
“I don’t watch a whole baseball game,” Thompson says. “I pay bills, I do other things with the game on in the background.”
And that’s probably where baseball is going to stay, no matter how exciting this year’s World Series might have been. The Cubs can only end a 108-year World Championship drought once. Now that it’s been done there is almost no way for the World Series to draw numbers like it did this fall.
“I don’t see how baseball can take anything from this World Series and use as leverage going forward,” Haupert says.
Football ratings might be dropping but it’s still the biggest show around.
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