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Dodgers-Yankees World Series is the holy grail of MLB and Fox – finally

Vaseline October 24, 2024

New York vs. Los Angeles in the fall classic could change the narrative on MLB’s TV ratings.

It’s a ratings jackpot more than four decades in the making, a bicoastal bonanza that has eluded Major League Baseball since 1981 and Fox Sports since the broadcasting giant broadcast its first World Series in 1996.

Dodgers vs. Yankees. LA vs. New York.

And most likely a year-long hiatus from the near-annual postmortems the US had just witnessed in the lowest-rated World Series in history.

That was the case again a year ago, when a game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers averaged just 9.11 million viewers over the five-game series, a new low that performed even worse than the 2020 Series that hit a neutral ground was contested during the height of the competition. pandemic.

Now baseball gets the match that illustrated the height of the sport’s popularity.

In 1978, the second consecutive Dodgers-Yankees battle averaged a record 44.2 million viewers for the six-game series, with the 32.8 rating nearly quadrupling from 4.7 in 2023. Three years later, viewers watched more than 41 million people attended the Dodgers’ six games. game revenge against the Yankees.

Of course, so much has changed in the 43 years since.

There are now four over-the-air networks. Cable television took over the airwaves and then divided the audience. Streaming cut it into bite-sized pieces and marginalized the once ubiquitous cable box.

And the NFL’s growth and hunger for global domination now command attention three nights a week in the fall, chasing the World Series from the hallowed Sunday night airwaves.

Yet the baseball industry now has a gift that has been forty years in the making: The Bronx versus the Beach, Aaron Judge and Juan Soto versus Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts.

And for better or worse, it’s about to find out just how good it can get in this atomized landscape.

“They should be jumping for joy, taking the top two markets and having such a great rivalry going back to their first World Series in 1941,” said Dennis Deninger, professor emeritus of sports management at Syracuse University and author of Live Sports Media: The What . How and why of sports broadcasting.

“The stars are also important. You have big markets and a history of rivalry between these two teams and big stars.”

Deninger predicts big things based on the appetizer: The LA-New York National League Championship Series, pitting the Dodgers against the Mets, drew some surprising numbers, most notably Game 1, which averaged 8.26 million viewers, the most for an NLCS since 2009 and rivaling last. World Series Song of the Year.

NLCS Game 1 also went up against Sunday Night Football and did some actual damage, with SNF losing 8% of its audience year-over-year while the baseball playoff game’s 15.4 million viewers nearly doubled.

For this World Series?

They are once again the two largest markets, with the more hallowed Yankees displacing the Mets and no NFL interference. And Deninger expects the average viewership to be around 16 million, which would be the highest for a World Series since the seven-game Dodgers-Houston Astros battle of 2017 averaged 18.9 million viewers.

After four consecutive years of World Series ratings that all finished among the lowest in history, it would be a handy reversal of the clock. And MLB has made some progress in that area lately.

The children remain in the picture

The former national pastime has always faced the existential crisis of an aging fan base, a trend line that echoes the era when TV ratings were king.

The coveted viewers ages 18 to 34 in the 1980s now qualify for Medicare, and their children and grandchildren are born into a traffic jam of entertainment options and social media distractions.

Still, the league’s aggressive efforts to speed up the game and present a more aesthetically pleasing game appear to be paying off.

Fox Sports, which broadcasts the NL Division Series and NLCS, has experienced a 39% increase in viewership among 18- to 34-year-olds participating in the World Series, according to a person familiar with 2024 postseason ratings.

The person spoke to USA TODAY Sports on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about ratings.

That jump comes after nearly all of MLB’s broadcast partners experienced double-digit growth in years 18 through 34 (Fox was at 9%).

At the end of the season, MLB reported that the average age for ticket purchasers has dropped from 51 to 46 since 2019, a period during which the percentage of ticket purchasers between the ages of 18 and 35 increased by 8.5%.

The league credits the increases to the pitch clock and liberal base-stealing rules; While there are a number of other reasons – especially being several years away from the height of the pandemic – it stands to reason that a younger, more distracted audience might be more excited for a sporting event that this year averages 2 hours and 38 minutes lasted. from 3:11 until 2021.

Simply put, Commissioner Rob Manfred says the “increased enthusiasm shown by baseball fans of all ages over the past two seasons is evident in all the ways we track fan engagement.”

The profits at the box office and with national television partners are all the more important given the uncertainty in the regional sports network space, where cord-cutting and the eventual bankruptcy of Sinclair-owned Diamond Sports Group have left countless franchises in limbo. .

The bankruptcy and a lengthy court battle led to MLB producing and acquiring the broadcast rights for six teams, with Minnesota, Cleveland and Milwaukee joining San Diego, Arizona and Colorado in 2025.

Diamond has committed to continuing to broadcast games for Atlanta and Miami, under the new name FanDuel Sports Network. The Texas Rangers mutually agreed to purchase their own rights to the market.

That leaves six teams — Detroit, Tampa Bay, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City and the Los Angeles Angels — on the move as bankruptcy proceedings continue.

Although income and expenses are not a direct line to success on the ground, there is a significant correlation. And while there are no such things as “have-nots” in Major League Baseball – more like “haves” and “have-mores” – the RSN situation has the potential to worsen revenue disparities.

Essentially: Clubs that own or have significant shares of their own networks – or huge deals in major markets – will continue to prosper. That includes Boston, both New York teams, the Dodgers and to a lesser extent Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Considering that three of this year’s final four came from that group — and the Cleveland Guardians were quickly dispatched in a five-game ALCS — this could serve as a coming attraction for an ultimately unappealing caste system. And a playoff structure in which a handful of teams dominate — as opposed to the relative parity of the past 23 seasons, in which 16 teams have won the Fall Classic.

For this year, however, the ultimate matchup is a novelty.

‘They don’t want to come third’

It’s not exactly the case that the NFL is the bear in the woods, and the MLB and the NBA are in a race to finish second or the bear will eat him.

But it’s certainly good for a league’s self-esteem to know it’s not No. 3. And that’s a plateau that MLB could aim for with this Dodgers-Yankees clash.

“The number to beat this year is 11.3 million viewers per minute versus the Celtics vs. Mavericks,” said Deninger of Syracuse. ‘I’m sure they’ll jump for joy if they reach that number.

“It’s, ‘Where are you in the pecking order of American sports?’ MLB knows it has the NFL’s back by turning Sunday nights over to the NFL. They don’t want to become a permanent third behind the NFL and NBA. It’s a marketing thing and a pride thing.

“And if it reaches more people, you can charge more for those championships.”

The NBA Finals have drawn larger crowds than the World Series in five of the past six full seasons, with only the 2021 Atlanta-Houston World Series surpassing the Milwaukee-Phoenix final.

In 2016, both championships lasted the full seven games, and the Chicago Cubs’ championship, which ended a 108-year drought, trumped the Warriors-Cavaliers LeBron-Steph battle, averaging 22.8 million viewers vs. 20.2 million viewers who watched Golden State make the famous 3-1. pipe.

That Cubs-Cleveland 2016 Game 7 shattered decades of ratings, with an average of 40.8 million viewers making it the most-watched Series game of this century, and the largest audience since Games 6 (40.8 million) and 7 ( 50.3 million) in 1991, when Minnesota and Atlanta went the distance.

New York and LA will aim for that ceiling.

“It’s what the people wanted,” Betts of the Dodgers said after clinching the NL pennant.

Now we’ll find out how many people that is.

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