World Series Ratings Down; Blame it on Baseball


For all of those quote "experts" out there who criticized baseball for maintaining a system which allowed big market teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox to spend astronomical amounts of money on players, thus giving them the best chance of making it to the World Series, this is your year. According to those same experts the problem with baseball was that it wasn't interesting enough to watch the big market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox battle it out every year. They called for more parity, equal spending from all teams and preached that as the key to increasing interest in baseball.

Well look now. After a year with more parity in baseball then at any time in the last decade the viewers aren't tuning in. The past two years, the World Series has received lower ratings then any other in history, and not just by a little. Statistics show tv ratings for the 2004 World Series featuring the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals rated over 4 points higher then the last year's World Series. And now this year, they have hit the ground floor. Expert's try to explain it by criticizing the networks, the weather, and the timing of the World Series. However, the World Series has been played at the same time, in the same weather and cycled through the same networks for more then a decade without losing ratings like this. So what's missing from the World Series that has been there the past decade?

Could it be those good old Yankees? Perhaps it is more fun for fans to watch the World Series and root against the Yankees then it is for a casual fan to watch the Tigers and the Cardinals and not care who wins. The evidence says so. The average rating for World Series in the past decade in which the Yankees participated in was over 14. Excluding the 2004 World Series, in which the Red Sox were attempting to overthrow the "curse of the babe", ratings for the World Series in 2002 and 2005 could not even reach twelve. And it appears this year's World Series will be even worse.

Its apparent, that while the baseball experts call for parity, the fans want more of the usual. They want to see the big market dynasty against the small market underdog. They don't want to watch two unknowns battle it out for the baseball glory. Perhaps parity is a concept better suited for football. A sport with a fan base that has nothing better to do then to sit on the couch on Sunday afternoon and watch whatever the league will put on the tube. Then when it comes to the Superbowl, millions of viewers will tune in just to see the commercials regardless of the calibre of teams playing in the game. But if your baseball, and you insist on playing your World Series games in primetime, in comepetition with football, other tv shows, and you can't get sponsors to spend ridiculous amounts of money to air brand new commercials, then you need more enticement then two pretty good teams with pretty good storylines.

So for all of those experts out there who can't wait to promote a salary cap, and any increase in parity, you can get a glimpse of the future. Dynasties, big market teams with big market stories and the underdorgs that topple them are what bring the interest and viewers. So experts beware, the longer baseball continues down the road of parity the farther "October Baseball" will fall back in the pack of ratings and interest in America.

-A.J. Karidis

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